


the moon dorm

by gaymess



Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/F, series of One-shots, slice of lifey, soft
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:40:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 42,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24044545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaymess/pseuds/gaymess
Summary: heejin blinks and before she knows it, she's surrounded by eleven other girls in a building meant for eight. suddenly, the moon dorm doesn't feel so empty anymore.maybe she feels like she's made a family away from home.-a collection of loosely connected one-shots of the girls living together (university au?)
Relationships: Choi Yerim | Choerry/Im Yeojin, Ha Sooyoung | Yves/Kim Jiwoo | Chuu, Jeon Heejin/Kim Hyunjin, Jo Haseul/Viian Wong | ViVi, Jung Jinsol | Jinsoul/Kim Jungeun | Kim Lip, Park Chaewon | Go Won/Son Hyejoo | Olivia Hye
Comments: 33
Kudos: 206





	1. pet-tendencies

"Are you saying you're anti-Mother Nature?! Unnie, you're the reason why the polar bears are dying!"

"No, I'm saying your music is trash, I don't need to hear you talking about plastic bottles over some cheap drums you got from Garage Band."

"A- It's called rapping-!"

Heejin pulls her headphones from her desk, trying to drown out the sound of Sooyoung and Chaewon's voices. They seem to be arguing over the latter's latest track (described as 'fire' by the artist herself) currently playing on the speakers. She's pretty sure that somewhere else in the dorm, Jinsoul, Yerim and Hyejoo are squabbling over whether Just Dance is rigged or not because Hyejoo seems to be getting a lot of points just by sitting down, and from the room next door she can hear Jiwoo rambling about the importance of glitter on paperwork when she's supposed to be working on whatever project it is she and the boy she had brought over from her class are meant to be working on.

In fact, she has her own project to be dealing with. Excpet she can't with all the noise coming from outside her bedroom.

Even when she kicks Haseul and Vivi out (the two had been quietly doing their own things, as always) the noise still seems to distract her from her work, and her eyes keep drifting over to the closed door with all of their timetables messily taped onto it.

If she's honest, all she wants to do at the moment is go out there and watch what will probably become a wrestling match between Jinsoul and Hyejoo (the younger of the two will obviously win, advantageous with her actual will to move). But she knows that she can't, because the last project she had delivered had been 'above avarage' thanks to the distraction of the other Moon Dorm residents.

Sighing, she turns to YouTube and tunes into a channel streaming study music. She's supposed to be working on her essay.

After some struggle trying to get into the groove of it, Heejin's fingers begin to fly across her keyboard. She's barely thinking about what she's typing, knowing that if she just bullshits it the first time around she can go back and edit it again later. The only thing on her mind is what they're going to have for dinner, and if they'll manage to convince Vivi to cook for them again after last time's incident (involving fire and a certain small, blonde-haired girl).

It's when she feels something touching her bare leg that she diverts her attention from the screen.

She jumps in her place on her bed as she meets Hyunjin's round eyes from the floor.

Slightly annoyed at being bothered when she had asked not to be, Heejin lifts one side of the headphones and deadpans the girl. "Hyunjin, not now. I'm busy."

Ready to go back to work, Heejin places her hands back onto her keyboad. She already knows that if she keeps it up, she'll be able to get it finished by dinner time (meaning she won't be eating on the floor, like those who arrived late usually did). But she feels another pat on her thigh and she's glaring at the culprit again.

"I'm serious. I need to get this finished." Heejin says sternly. Normally, she'll cave and give attention to whatever distraction comes her way (anything to get her out of talking about why astrophysics defies old philosophists), but not tonight. She's determined to finish the project.

Before she can even press her finger onto a single key, she feels Hyunjin rest her chin against her leg.

"Hyun, please." Heejin turns to look at the other girl with pleading eyes.

It's because of them being close thanks to their same age and the fact that they were both the first ones to come into the Moon Dorm, that Heejin finds it difficult to send Hyunjin away. She's normally the cause for many of her distractions, mostly because the other girl tends to be wild and have a bad habit of bothering their other roommates, so everyone resorts to asking her to control her.

("Heejin-ah, Hyunjin's acting up again! Come put her in her place!")

But she's set walls around herself (with nice, big, red signs saying 'leave me alone, I'm studying') so the puppy eyes that Hyunjin is giving her don't work on her.

When Hyunjin doesn't move from her place, Heejin groans. "If you let me work, I'll let you have the sweet potato bread on top of the fridge."

Promptly, the other girl quickly leaves the room without a word. She'd been saving that up for herself for when she got cravings in the middle of the night, and now their resident bread-lover is going to completely raid her food stash and eat it all up.

Shrugging off the mild annoyance, she returns to writing the damned essay. She has a million tabs open with wikipedia pages that she shouldn't be trusting and other people's essays on the topic, and her cursor is flying over them like she's a magician picking at random cards. This is what she regrets most about listening to her parents and going to university - the stupid essays that leave her brain dead and the deadlines that make her lose hair because of the stress.

Maybe she should do what Chaewon does and get someone else to do it for her - sure it will take more persuasion than a flick of the wrist and a light 'do it because you wroship me' (she thinks that maybe some money will do - they can't all walk around with the same confidence that Chaewon has) but would it be worth saving the little braincells she has left?

She tries to retrack and focus on her essay. But then she starts wondering how on earth Chaewon managed to convince the whole campus that she's a princess and that they should all bow down to her, because their country hasn't had a monarchy in over a century and she's almost certain that she's been a city-girl all her life. She still remembers the day that she had actually walked into her class with a crown perched atop her head and everyone had just seen it as the confirmation that she was indeed royalty - they'd even started nicknaming her 'The Princess of the Moon Dorm' (what the fuck) which led to the small girl demanding to be called princess at the dorm too.

(Of course, no one listened at first, until Sooyoung had started saying it in an ironic manner, which led to the nickname becoming a kind of inside joke in the dorm.)

If she shows up and starts saying that she's a famous model from France, will people believe her? She's pretty sure she can pull it off - it doesn't look like people around here are very smart-

Funnily enough, Hyunjin chooses the most opportune moment to drape herself across her lap.

"Hyunjin!" Heejin whines when her sentence veers off from talking about the stars into ahgsergssee.

Said girl's cheeks are puffed out from what Heejin assumes to be her beloved sweet potato bread, and her eyes continue to gaze up at her with round curiosity. She's stubbornly resting most of her upper body across her legs, her hands mindlessly playing with a hairband to keep herself busy, and still chewing away at the food stashed in her mouth like she's a squirrel.

"Fine, you can stay-" Heejin knows that Hyunjin is as stubborn as a rock, so she tells herself that it can't really be helped. "-only if you're quiet and you let me type."

Hyunjin, looking too smug and pleased with her mild achievement, makes herself comfortable in her lap. "Yuhf."

Grimacing at the crumbs that fly out of the girl's mouth, Heejin returns her attention to her computer screen. They usually have dinner around eight, meaning she has enough time to spare afterwards to actually spend some time with her needy best friend.

She manages to write four full sentences before her mind is wandering again.

Instead she starts wondering whether or not she can attend Jungeun's dance performance during the weekend. It's been a while since the older girl has invited them to one of her performances (reasonable, since the last time all eleven of them had been there they'd thoroughly embarrassed her with big banners spelling out 'Kim Lip Daddy' (courtesy of Jiwoo herself) and enough flowers to pollinate the entire auditorium) so she knows that she has to take up this opportunity like it's the last pizza slize on the table on a Friday night. Besides, Hyunjin is part of the same dance company, which means that she will definitely be there...

When her hands come to a stop, Hyunjin uses this opportunity to turn in her lap and wrap her arms around her waist, her face pressing against her stomach.

Heejin spares her a glance, used to the affection from the other girl (it doesn't stop her ears from warming every time), and loses track of time for a second. Hyunjin is dressed in one of her oversized white shirts she uses as pajamas, hiding the shorts she wears underneath and making her look cuter than usual. Her hair is tied together in a loose, messy plait that was probably thrown together somewhere throughout the day.

Absently, Heejin begins to stroke her hair, a habit formed out of (initially) boredom and (eventually) affection. The music playing in her headphones helps her take a moment to just breathe and enjoy the strange embrace as Hyunjin cuddles further into her. Her eyelashes flutter slightly when Heejin starts massaging her scalp, and the latter finds herself becoming even more distracted by the way her best friend's body rises and falls with every inhale and exhale.

Blinking herself out of her stupor, Heejin redirects her attention to the laptop in front of her and resumes her typing (this time more messily than the first).

Surprisingly, Hyunjin doesn't bother her for a while, remaining still in her chosen cuddling position. This allows Heejin to almost reach the end of her essay, so when she arrives at the end of her argument she allows herself to glance at the time.

It's almost eight.

She wonders if Jiwoo has spared that boy from her endless ranting and sent him home (though she knows that if she hasn't, Sooyoung will probably force her to and scold her for keeping a guest so late). Jiwoo had wanted to watch a movie with her, because she said that they'd both like it and that they both needed to have their special, designated cuddle time, but at this rate Heejin doubts they're going to be able to fit time in for that. She knows that the older girl will probably be sulky at that, but she'll eventually turn her attention to one of the other girls (she'll try to get to Jungeun, but get denied with the likely excuse of 'you wake up too late', and turn to the likes of Hyejoo, who secretely enjoys being doted on) and force them to sleep in her bed.

For a moment, she wonders if Jiwoo will actually dare to sneak into her room and enforce herself onto the already cramped bed (it wouldn't be the first time, but she really doesn't want a moody Sooyoung so early in the morning) and hopes that she finds herself another cuddle buddy.

Speaking of, Hyunjin seems to have accidentally woken herself up with a quiet snore, her body jolting in its place for a second.

A small smile has made its way on to Heejin's face before she can help it, and she just watches as Hyunjin blinks herself out of the small nap she'd fallen into. Her tongue darts out to wet her dry lips before she's lazily turning in her lap and staring up at her through her eyelashes.

(Heejin decides to ignore the warm feeling she gets in her chest.)

She just stares at her best friend who's drowsily observing her with slow blinking eyes that make the hairs on the back of her neck rise up. The comfortable weight on her lap makes her heart squeeze in content, and before she knows it her hand is already moving to push out the strands of hair that had caught on her face.

Hyunjin playfully nips at her fingers as they try to pull the strands of hair caught on her lips, and Heejin giggles softly before hitting her forehead to tell her off. At that, the other girl grimaces and grabs a hold of her wrists, trying to bring her hands closer so she can bite at them.

"Stop, Hyun." Heejin laughs, attempting to push the other girl off of her lap.

Instead of listening to her, Hyunjin moves closer to her and hides her face into her stomach again. Heejin feels her heart picking up when the warmth of Hyunjin's lips press against her skin through her thin shirt. Moments like these make her forget that they're friends, and only friends - perhaps her mind beginning to wander to unknown territory that she had never allowed herself to fully explore.

She's almost grateful when she has to hastily push the source of all her troubles away when she feels her playfully biting at her, to which Hyunjin laughs softly and moves to sit up beside her and allow herself to be hit on the back and shoulders.

"You're so annoying." Heejin whines, tugging her headphones down so they rest on her collarbones.

"You're not getting anything you don't deserve." Hyunjin playfully winks at her, before she's sent into another bout of laughter when Heejin just sulkily turns her face away from her.

"You didn't even let me finish my essay." It's true, her writing still needs a conclusion before she can call it quits.

The bed room door pushes open and Haseul peeks her head through the door. She looks surprised to find Hyunjin there, though Heejin doesn't blame her since she'd told her she needed to be alone to get her to leave.

"Dinner's ready." She says, her body already leaning away from the room to head to the kitchen. "I convinced Vivi to help me cook, so before you start complaining-"

"Hyunjin-unnie's eating on the floor!"

Yeojin uncerimoniously pushes past Haseul on her way down the hallway, the older girl already on her tail shouting, "Hey! What did I tell you about running in the house?!"

Heejin barely has any time to process anything before Hyunjin's bolting off the bed and chasing after the two, leaving her there with her damned essay.

She sighs, deciding to finish it tomorrow. She knows she won't be able to tonight.

"Oh! Heejin-ah," Jiwoo backtracks so she stands in front of her room, a wide smile on her face and hair dishevelled, "you coming?"

Heejin nods with a small smile on her face, pushing herself off of the bed and going to Jiwoo's side and linking their arms together. The older girl is already rambling at her about the progress of her project, while she distractedly fixes her bangs so they lay neatly on her forehead (everyone knows that Sooyoung is protective over Jiwoo, no matter how much the older girl denies it).

What she had written wasn't very good anyway. (She had never been good at multi-tasking.)

-

Heejin tries to concentrate on the TV, where Haseul's latest movie recommendation is playing out. But the loud voices coming from the coffee table in the center of the living room are too distracting for her to focus on the spontaneous song that breaks out in the movie.

Most of the girls have gathered there to play an intense round of Monopoly (or as they like to call it: The Destroyer of Friendships).

Sooyoung has her eyes inently set on the gameboard as she holds the die in her hand, Hyejoo at her back, whispering to her at what angle she should throw them so they get the highest possible number. Chaewon sits cross-legged, whining in her high-pitched voice at Jiwoo who is currently resting all of her weight on her and squeezing her arms around her as tight as possible. Yerim dances and sways excitedly between Chaewon and Yeojin. The youngest Moon Dorm resident is cackling to herself, and is surprisingly backed up by a serious-looking Jinsoul donned in a strange sort of cape and sunglasses (why is she wearing those indoors?).

Yeojin shouts at Sooyoung to "hurry up, old hag" as Hyunjin runs her hand along the notes of fake money in her possession, a competitive streak to her eyes.

She glances at Haseul (the unspoken leader and mother of the Moon Dorm) to see if she's seeing what she's seeing, but finds that the older woman is completely enraptured with the movie on the TV, jaw dropped and everything. Beside her, Vivi (her second best chance at getting the situation under control since Sooyoung seems to be involved in it, too) quietly reads at her papers with a red pen between her teeth, round glasses perched low on her nose.

Heejin grimaces when the group of girls break out into cheers/whines. They're lucky that they don't have neighbors who live nearby.

"Looks like karma to me! Pay up, peasants!"

"Fuck you, Chae."

They've been at it for a while now, originally beginning with the girls who shared room 3 (Sooyoung, Hyejoo, Jiwoo and Chaewon), but new players were added until they'd formed a raucus group.

Hyunjin had been the latest to join, having been at the dance studio with Jungeun who had called dibs on the shower first, and had immediately demmanded to replace Jinsoul's position to play. Heejin just watched in amusement as her best friend - too clouded by her competitiveness to even address anything or anyone else in the room - pushed the older girl out from her place and took her desired character piece.

After a while, though, the insults and shouting become a source of an incoming headache so she finds herself resting her head on the back of the couch, eyes closing in an attempt to soothe it. She could go into her room to get some much needed silence, but she doesn't want to distance herself from the girls when they're all here together. The very least she can do is be present when they're having group time. Even if she's starting to doze off on the couch.

She's almost into dreamland (distant thoughts of old philosophers appearing naked in her mind and scarring her forever) when she hears her name being called out.

"Heejin-unnie."

She lifts her head and looks for the source of the voice, only to find Jiwoo and Hyunjin wrestling for what looks like a position to play the game. Hyejoo is looking at her from her place behind Sooyoung (who is shouting at the two girls to "stop fucking around when Hyunjin is still sweaty", because then Jiwoo will have to take a shower and waste more water, and Yerim just widens her eyes as she covers Yeojin's ears at the 'foul language') with an expectant expression on her bored face. Heejin raises her eyebrow at her in question and she points towards the group of girls.

"Unnie!" Yeojin shouts at her, grimacing as she moves away from where Hyunjin has just fallen over beside her, Jiwoo toppling over too from the momentum. "Take Hyunjin-unnie to the bathroom!"

Heejin furrows her brow when she hears the sentence, straightening in her place. On the couch beside her is a recently bathed Jungeun, holding a towel to dry her hair with.

"Go wash the animal." Jungeun says nonchalantly, though the sparkle in her eye giving away the mischief.

Heejin's brow furrows even more. "What? Why me? Why do I have to do it?"

"She's yours, isn't she?" Jungeun says it like it's the easiest thing to say, but all it does is light her face on fire at the implication.

"What? No. I mean-" Heejin groans in frustration when she sees the look the Jungeun is giving her, pushing the older girl away softly. "Why can't she just do it herself?"

Just then, Hyunjin manages to tackle Jiwoo to the floor, earning an entertained 'whoop' from Chaewon and an increasingly annoyed 'hey!' from Sooyoung. "Go shower! Dirty!" Jiwoo squeals from the floor, pushing away Hyunjin's sweaty face with her hand.

Heejin ingores the look that Jungeun gives her as she stands up from the couch, grumbling slightly under her breath at the unfortune of being given the apparent role of 'Hyunjin's owner'. She dodges a falling Jinsoul, who's laughing with her whole body like this is the funniest thing on earth, and approaches the two squabbling girls who are too busy to register anything that anyone else is saying.

Knowing her best friend like the back of her hand, she knows that she will not give in easily due to her stubborness. So when she sees an opening in the midst of all the flailing limbs, she grabs a hold of the back of the shirt she's wearing and tugs at it like an owner tugging at their dog's collar to get them to stop fighting another dog. "Hyunjin." She says sternly, her voice loud enough so said girl can hear her over the noise of their dorm.

Immediately, the girl stops and looks up at her, an annoyed look on her face. "That's not fair, I was in the middle of playing." She scowls, looking like an angry child.

"I don't care. Jungeun's done with the shower, it's your turn." Heejin points out as reasonably as possible. When Hyunjin's attention strays from her to the group of girls (Jiwoo has already swiftly moved into her position and stolen her money), Heejin tugs on the back of her shirt again. "Hyun, come on."

Hyunjin - ever the prideful person - decides that if she's not going to have her way she's going to sulk instead. So she sits there, on the floor, with a scowl etched onto her face.

Heejin's just frustrated that her best friend is being so childish and that her headache is managing to increase the more time she spends worrying about something so stupid, so she's reached her point of patience and fixes her grip so it's firmer. With all of her strength and effort, she begins to drag Hyunjin away from the living room and towards the bathroom, ignoring the yelps of surprise and the whines of disapproval coming from the other girl.

If she wants to be stubborn, so be it.

It probably comes down to a battle of pride - Heejin muses as she tugs on Hyunjin's arm - when the other girl refuses to let go of the bathroom doorway as if its the last thing keeping her from Hell. She knows that if it were any other situation, Hyunjin would have willingly walked into the bathroom and would have taken a shower all on her own. But when faced with a challenge (Heejin, in this case) she would refuse to listen and do her best to go against it.

But Heejin's not having any of it.

Managing to lock the bathroom door behind her, she gets a better grip of Hyunjin's upper arm and pulls her into the shower. When she turns on the water, Hyunjin's screams and tries getting out of the way, only to be stopped by Heejin who pushes her back in with her hands.

"It's cold! Heejin! Fuck!"

"That's what you get for being so stubborn!" Heejin shouts back, grimacing as the water bounces off of Hyunjin's body and sprays onto her face. It is cold, but she finds it oddly soothing to her headache.

"What the fuck!" Hyunjin swats her hands away, instead running her own down her face to wipe at the water clouding her vision. She glares at her as much as she can while the showerhead is pelting droplets at her, looking like a moody cat that doesn't want to bathe. "I'm still in my clothes!"

"Maybe next time listen the first time we tell you to shower." Now Heejin's pride has swollen. Backing out now would mean that Hyunjin wins, and she sees this as some prank that she can get back at her through one of her elaborate schemes that will only make her more angry. She's had too many in the past to make her realise that: no, she is not backing out.

When Hyunjin is too busy fretting over her shirt, Heejin leans over so she can put her hands covered in shampoo on her hair. She's harsh with how she shakes her hands, spreading the bubbles into the black, wet strands, and ignores the string of curses that leave Hyunjin's mouth.

As some kind of revenge, Hyunjin grabs a hold of her arm and tugs her under the showerhead, both of them getting sprayed by the slowly warming water. Heejin squeals, blindly reaching out to put her right hand back in Hyunjin's hair while the other girl just grabs a hold of her left wrist to stop her from moving. The water is soaking into her clothes and making it stick to her body, and she realises too late that her shirt is white, and is probably going see-through.

Trying to get out of the shower, Heejin feels a pair of arms wrapping around her waist and keeping her there. She shouts to be released, only for Hyunjin to pick her up from the floor and spin her so she's the one farthest from the exit.

It doesn't even matter now, because Hyunjin's hair is messily covered in shampoo, one of her eye tightly closed as it slides down onto her face, so she can't leave without washing it off. Throughout the struggle, Hyunjin seems to have successfully taken her shirt off, and is now left in her sports bra and black, baggy tracksuit bottoms, her skin shining with the water trailing down her skin. Even though Heejin doesn't feel as embarrassed now about her white shirt, she's more embarrassed about her reaction to the sudden sight in front of her.

At some point, Hyunjin starts laughing.

It's loud, and full, and so ridiculous that Heejin can't help but join in.

For some reason, Heejin feels free. In the tiny, compact shower with Hyunjin standing just a couple of centimetres away from her, she has never felt more free.

"We're so stupid." Heejin laughs, staring at Hyunjin as she wipes away the shampoo from her eye.

"You're the one who dragged me in here." She points out, a large grin on her face. "Now we both have to take a shower."

Rolling her eyes at the pettiness, Heejin lunges forward and musses her hair up with the shampoo in her hands. "You smelt really bad anyways." She pokes her tongue out at Hyunjin when the taller girl peeks through her tightly clenched eyes.

Instead of saying anything back, she simply reaches for the shampoo bottle and lathers on a generous amount. Heejin blushes when Hyunjin starts washing her hair for her, a soft, distracted smile on her face as she does so. She can't help but feel like this moment is incredibly intimate - she never knew that washing someone else's hair could be so... romantic? She really doesn't know what to call this atmosphere that's beginning to make the air hot.

Hyunjin begins to play with her hair, pulling her hands upwards in a quick manner. "Look, you have a mohawk!"

"Stupid." Heejin bats her hands away, quickly nudging her out of the way to wash out the shampoo from her hair.

When she opens her eyes again, she finds Hyunjin staring at her with an unreadable look on her face. The warmth of the water hits at her back, beginning to form steam in the bathroom, so she excuses the redness in Hyunjin's cheeks for the temperature of the water.

"Come here." Heejin softly waves at her to move closer, which Hyunjin obeys with little hesitation. She tip-toes up to grab the showerhead while using the taller girl's forearm for support, before beginning to rinse out all of the shampoo from her hair. It's natural when she begins to massage at her scalp again, the motion familiar by now. (When she feels Hyunjin leaning into her hand she feels her chest warm but says nothing about it.)

When they finish, Hyunjin offers to go run to get them some spare clothes since they're both still in their wet ones. Heejin hears the comments that the other girls make when they see Hyunjin scuttling across the living room, upper body wrapped up in a towel with her hair still wet and draping down her back.

"Get it, Kim!"

"I'm never going to be using that shower again..."

"Don't do dirty things in the shower!"

"If you touched my innocent Heekie, I will murder you!"

Heejin feels her heart swelling in her chest.

-

Heejin is exhausted.

Work had been a bitch today (a man had not so kindly crumpled and thrown his receipt with some of his change at her when she got his order wrong (Hyejoo had suggested tracking him online and hacking his social media to release all of his nudes)) and the one class she had had lasted three hours, forcing her to miss the bus and have to walk home.

Yeojin had immediately given her her seat when they were having dinner, and Sooyoung, who was beside her, wordlessly threw her arm around her and tried cheering her up by teasing her. She appreciated the girls' efforts at cheering her up, but she couldn't help but deny Haseul's offer to watch her favorite movie on the TV (Jungeun swore she'd even stay up to watch it with them). Instead she said good night to everyone and disappeared into room 1.

Vivi is already in the room working on her studies, like always, but when Heejin doesn't say anything to her when she slips into the comforts of her own bed, the older girl rises from her chair at the desk and quietly approaches her.

"Hey." The older girl crouches beside her bed, meeting her tired eyes through her glasses. "How are you?"

Heejin feels tears welling in her eyes. Everyone in the dorm knows how busy and dedicated Vivi is with her studies and her part-time job - literally everything she does - and often find that the eldest Moon Dorm resident's determination is extremely admirable. They do their best to steer clear out of her way, and Vivi appreciates it. But here she is going out of her way to talk to her - to ask her how she is. She can't help but feel incredibly touched.

"Hey, it's okay." Vivi quickly catches the tear that slips out of her eye before it can fall too far, smiling a small, bitter smile. Her words are a little stuttered due to her still not being as fluent in Korean as she would like, but Heejin takes them in like it's the most fluent she's heard anyone speak today.

The older girl perches on the bed by her side, her hand gliding up and down her back in a comforting manner as the tears begin to fall out of her eyes.

Heejin feels a wave of homesickness wash over her, and it makes her feel nauseous.

Over time that she has spent in the Moon Dorm, she has grown to call this place her 'home'. The girls who inhabit it - with their strange quirks and annoying tendencies - have become the very family that she loves and cares for. But as Vivi rubs her back like her mother used to when she was still younger, in another city and in another bed, she finds herself missing a different home. And she can't help but feel like she's betraying the family that she has here in the Moon Dorm, because these girls mean the world to her and she would do anything for them, just as they do everything they can to make sure she feels like she's loved and at home - even if they do argue from time to time.

But all she wants to do now is be back in her bed at home and feel the weight of all of her responsibilities be lifted from her shoulders.

She doesn't know how long she's at it when the weight on her bed lifts and suddenly Vivi is moving away.

She feels almost pathetic when she blindly reaches out to hold onto the older girl's hand for comfort.

There are voices speaking lowly, before quick footsteps make their way over to her and an all too familiar face is dropping in front of hers with a concerned frown on it.

When Heejin meets Hyunjin's mildly angry eyes, she feels her lower lip trembling into a pout. She doesn't last five seconds before she lets out a half-relieved, half-stressed sob and she's gripping onto the closest hand she can get to. Hyunjin doesn't say anything as she gently pushes her onto her back, lifting the covers up so she can slide her body onto the bed like its hers (it practically is, Heejin thinks, with how often she sleeps in it).

Heejin catches Vivi quietly closing the bedroom door on the way out, though her view is quickly obstructed when Hyunjin drapes her body over her. The familiar weight that presses her against the comfortable mattress is enough to calm the rocky sobs that had been escaping her mouth, and she finds herself instinctively reaching up to wrap her arms around Hyunjin's upper body to bring her closer. Their legs tangle together like a memorised dance, and Hyunjin hides her face in the crook of her neck because she knows that she likes it when she does that.

They don't say anything until Heejin has calmed down enough for her breathing to go back to normal. She can feel Hyunjin's unsteady heartbeat against her ribcage and her slightly heavy breaths against the skin on her neck.

It's impressive how quick she is to feel okay again when Hyunjin is around. Like the balance has been restored in the world.

"Hey..." Heejin says. Her voice is rough because her throat has closed up with all the crying, but she can still talk well enough to concern herself over her best friend.

Hyunjin doesn't say anything - she only tightens her grip on the sides of her torso and buries her head deeper into her neck. When Heejin feels the taller girl's body tremble slightly, it's only then that she realises her body has been vibrating this whole time as if she were cold.

"Hyunjin, hey..." Heejin tries coaxing Hyunjin head from where it lies in her neck, nudging it softly with the side of hers. "What's wrong?"

Not saying anything, Hyunjin shakes her head. Heejin sighs, threading her fingers into her hair and untangling the knots carefully. The other girl smells like a mixture of the night and fresh air, her perfume slightly worn on her clothes and the temperature of her body cold because of the weather outside. It's comforting - like a breath of oxygen after being underwater for so long. It makes her heartbeat slow down and her breaths even out, and with Hyunjin's own beating pulse drumming against hers, she feels them beginning to syncronise.

"I missed you."

The words have come out of Heejin's mouth before she realises it and with them she's greeted with a warm epiphany. Her homesickness had not been for her old home - though Vivi had certainly reminded her of her mother - but for an entirely different concept of a home she never knew she could have. The words are raw and come from a place that she's been trying her best to ignore for the longest time, but now that she's said them it feels like she unleashed something from a cage that she isn't sure she's ready to unlock. Feelings she isn't ready to deal with. Her homesickness was gone the moment she felt Hyunjin's body against hers like she does every night.

Hyunjin pushes herself up when she hears her, but Heejin has barely any time to see her face before hers is being cradled.

She flinches her eyes shut when Hyunjin leans in, but quickly opens them again when she feels lips being pressed to her cheeks. And then again, and again, and again...

Hyunjin is peppering her whole face with kisses: placing them over her tear-tracks on her cheeks; pecking her nose softly as she moves to the other side of her face; moving so close to the edge of her hairline that one almost touches her burning ears; even on her chin and along her jaw with a kind of insistance that it reminds her of her dog back home.

Heejin's whole body is burning when she has half the mind to stop the other girl, her hands snaking around to frame her face and hold it in place. She feels the wetness of her cheeks on her fingers and her face immediately melts when she realises that Hyunjin has also been crying. Which the other girl obviously doesn't want her to see because she hides her face in her chest and lets out a small, embarrassed whine.

"Hyun, bab-" Heejin stops herself, ears burning. "Why are you crying?"

With some patience and a few beats of silence, Hyunjin sniffles and shyly lifts her head again. "I had a bad day." Her voice is shaky when she talks, and Heejin quickly tightens her grip around her. It's rare to see their strongest member show her emotions so blatantly, and even though Heejin does wish that she would more often, it doesn't mean she enjoys watching her suffer. "And then I heard that you- that-" Heejin waits for her to gather her words, trying to fix her expression into something akin to comfort. "You don't deserve to be treated like that."

Heejin's heart swells in her chest, ready to burst at the seams for the girl above her. "You're so precious." She breathes out mindlessly.

Hyunjin's face tints a beautiful pink, and she's suddenly scowling at her. "Shut up, you're more precious."

They laugh quietly at their ridiculousness, Hyunjin's forehead resting against Heejin's.

It feels right. Heejin just knows it. She knows that having Hyunjin with her will always make her feel that same, warm, fluttering feeling in her chest.

"I'm tired." Hyunjin whispers into the air between them, and Heejin can feel the words on her lips, ready there for her to steal and silence. But she looks at her best friend's tired face, wet with tears and pink with emotion, and decides that maybe she doesn't have to deal with her feelings right now. That they have all the time in the world.

The two sink together like puzzle pieces, and Heejin finally feels at home.


	2. innocent

Jiwoo knows herself.

She knows that the campus has given her the reputation of being a bright, energetic girl who likes to speak her mind through loud, passionate rants and has trouble keeping still during long lectures. This image has graced her with the ability to approach anyone and everyone at university without being turned away with judgemental glares (they're still judgemental, but in a more curious manner) and disinterested waves of the hand. In fact, she's almost sure that if she were to announce that she needed help with some of the material that they have to know, there will be a line of people tripping over one another to help her out.

The problem that people face is that they greatly underestimate her.

No one would expect friendly, bubbly, Kim Jiwoo to take advantage of her peers in order to benefit her student cred.

(It's not in a malicious manner - mostly she just plays up her charm when she really doesn't want to do something that she feels will bore the living daylights out of her, or when she really needs to - but whenever she manages to trick one of her acquaintances (read: male fanatics) into giving her the answers, she always feel like she's the worst human being on earth.)

Jiwoo doesn't know what to make of the image.

After getting out of high school, she had promised herself that university would be different. Gone would be the baby fat on her cheeks ("How can you not squish them?" Yerim had asked when Jiwoo told her to stop) and the soft make-up that made her look like a thirteen-year-old. She wanted to be grown-up and look like a woman rather than the teenager that spent her time in noraebangs, eating snacks with her friends and singing her heart out over cheesy, childish songs, no matter how much Jungeun tells her that it's in her DNA to be that person.

But from the get-go, she had accidentally grinned too wide at one of the other students when they had helped her find the way to her class, and then rumors had spread of her being 'cute' and 'friendly' and 'innocent' and people were expecting her to be the epitome of happiness.

Jiwoo had been reluctant at first (she had indeed gone into a mini-depression phase, which had required Jungeun to shyly ask for the rest of the Moon Dorm residents' help in getting her out of her slump - her best friend still holds that against her, to which she replies with "but that made us closer to the other girls for the first time!") but she eventually grew to see the positives of her image:

She doesn't have to try too hard for a first impression, because everyone already knows and likes her from the get go.

People are willing to be stepped on if it makes her smile (she's literally overheard a conversation between first years saying: "I wouldn't mind having Kim Jiwoo step on me" followed by a, "Dude, me too!").

She can float around campus without a care in the world.

Really, after accepting her character with open arms and the trademark smile that made even some of the female students swoon, Jiwoo found herself gaining confidence in her still chubby cheeks and soft make-up. She even dresses in girly clothes and putting flowers in her hair, just because she secretly enjoys being dubbed as the 'innocent' girl.

The only problems that come with this image, Jiwoo thinks, is the way it transgresses into her dorm.

"Jiwoo-yah, come give me a hug." Haseul will randomly tug her into one of her bear-hugs in the middle of a serious conversation and squeeze her arms around her tight as she nuzzles their heads together. It's easy to push the mild irritation at being babied when she's being cuddled (which is her favorite thing in the world).

"Baby~" Jinsoul will call her as Jiwoo throws herself onto the couch and effectively landing on the older girl, her hands wraping around to hold her like a newborn. (This one Jiwoo knows isn't really valid, since the blonde has a bad habit of calling all the girls 'Baby', but she still feels like a three-year-old whenever she gets called that.)

"Aw, you're so cute~" Vivi will gently cup her puffy face with her hands as she's messily eating her breakfast and hold it like it's the most precious thing in the world. Which Jiwoo does not understand because she just woke up five minutes ago and she caught her reflection in the mirror (her bangs had been pulled up to reveal her wide forehead due to her habit of sliding her face down her bed in her sleep and she's pretty sure there was a bit of drool on the collar of her shirt).

She's just about had enough when she's in the kitchen, trying to get to her pink mug to make herself a cup of much-needed coffee while cursing out whoever had the brilliant idea of placing it there, and Hyejoo comes up behind her. The younger girl easily reaches up (she still has to go on her tip-toes, but she can access the top shelf far more easily than she can) and grabs a hold of her mug for her. "Here you go." Jiwoo will pout at her, saying a reluctant 'thanks'. "Maybe you should be the one calling me 'Unnie'."

(Jiwoo tells her to go back to her video games while Hyejoo just chuckles at her.)

It's not fair.

Jungeun and her are the same age - they grew up together - Jiwoo can still remember when her best friend had the same amount of baby fat as she did.

So how did Jungeun grow out of it so quickly and leave her behind?

"Don't worry Jiwoo-yah," Jungeun assures her as she carelessly ties her hair up into a high-ponytail (even that looks hot, what the fuck), "you're adorable. Everyone loves that about you."

Jiwoo whines at her best friend, who looks _mature_ and _hot_ and _womanly_ in her work out clothes. "I don't wanna be adorable!" They've had this conversation before, when Jiwoo had insisted on trying to diet and go to the gym but had barely even lasted a week (just like her best friend had predicted, much to her dismay). "I wanna be sexy! I wanna be able to go buy some beer without being forced to show my ID!"

Jungeun rolls her eyes slightly, already used to all of her whining. "Jiwoo, I think the day you'll be 'sexy' is the day Yeojin actually grows taller than five feet-"

"Are you guys talking about me?!"

"- _No_! Just go back to watching your Tellitubies! Anyway, what I'm saying is-" Jungeun leans down to grab a hold of her trainers amongst the mountain of shoes that accumulate beside the door, and Jiwoo can't help but glare enviously at the way her butt looks great in those leggings. "-the day you become sexy is the day that the world ends." Jiwoo scowls, offended at the implication that she'll never be able to be mature, but it seems like Jungeun has noticed that she's said something that hurt her because she's quick to grab her by the face and squeeze her cheeks together. "But that's what makes you who you are, Woo. And I love who you are, so you should too."

Jiwoo just pouts at her best friend, most likely looking more childish with the way her cheeks are pushed together. "Yeah, love you too..." She says reluctantly when Jungeun pushes her face away, going back to putting her shoes on.

"Hey, look," Jungeun pulls at her bag on the floor, throwing it on her back casually, "if you want, when I get back we can go on Instagram and stalk that crush of yours - what was his name again?"

"Taehyung-oppa?"

"Yeah, him - and then we can snoop through his life to see if he has a girlfriend or not-"

"Wait, I don't like him like that!"

"Mhm, sure." Jungeun smirks at her, with her red gloss on her lips, and Jiwoo has half the mind to punch her stomach. "Anyways, I'll even get you ice-cream and everything - strawberry?"

"I'm craving salted caramel."

"Yup, so I'll have to stop by the store... _Ya! Kim Hyunjin! Let's go!_ Anything else you're craving?" Jungeun turns to her, hand already pulling the door open.

Jiwoo knows that she shouldn't be eating too much, but the offer is too tempting to refuse, so with a tiny voice she says, "Can you get chocolate bread?"

Jungeun nods nonchalantly, scrolling through her phone. The sunlight from outside is shining on her angular face, and Jiwoo just watches it accent all of her features perfectly. "Kim Hyunjn, I swear to god!" She doesn't even flinch when the other girl practically screams into the dorm, already used to the loud volume of a day in the life of the Moon Dorm. "Can I remind you that we're taking the bus?!"

"I'm coming!" They hear a frustrated Hyunjin call back from the dorm, already storming across the living room where Yeojin is doing her homework and hissing under her breath. " _Fuck's sake, can I not get my shit together for one - hot - second_..."

"What was that?" Jungeun taunts when the younger girl brushes past her to leave the dorm, still trying to shrug on her hoodie. She waves a quick 'bye' to Jiwoo before following after Hyunjin.

Jiwoo watches them leave down the steps, Jungeun automatically moving to hold Hyunjin's bag for her in order to help while the younger girl starts talking about something or other. Their dynamic is different to Jungeun's and Jiwoo's, in the sense where they're more like teammates who like to get competitive with one another and aren't afraid to be upfront verbally - even if it's going to hurt someone because of it. She has to admit that it's entertaining watching them interact, but she can't help feel jealous over their mature appearances.

"Jiwoo-unnie! Can you help me with my homework?"

Jiwoo sighs, closing the door and gliding back to where Yeojin sits in front of the cofee table. At least she can still treat Yeojin like a baby, she thinks as she smiles softly at her and pats her head.

-

Jiwoo catches Sooyoung just as she's about to leave the dorm, looking as fashionable as always in an off-shoulder top, long pants and high heels.

"Unnie! Wait, are you going to campus?" She asks, still hopping through the living room as she tries to put on her flats. The pastel pink dress she's wearing flutters around her, and she does her best not to fall flat on her face in an attempt to reach the older girl before she leaves for good.

Sooyoung looks up from her phone screen, looking at her with a bored expression, before shoving the device into her purse. "I guess I am," she says nonchalantly, reaching out to steady her by the forearm as she reaches the doorway, "why? Do you need an escort?"

Rolling her eyes, Jiwoo shoves her away before checking her appearance in the mirror Vivi set up beside the door. Her appearance is soft and innocent as always, but she doesn't mind because she's going to go to her class and try to befriend that shy looking boy who looks like he gets good grades (not for any ulterior motives or anything). "I don't need an escort, Unnie, but if you insist I guess I'll just have to take you up on the offer."

Instead of saying anything, Sooyoung just sighs and begins to step out of the door, leaving it open for her. She quickly follows after her, closing the door hastily before bounding down the steps in her haste not be left behind by the seemingly determined girl.

As they begin to walk side by side down the road, the sun shining brightly and the blue skies clear from any stray clouds, Jiwoo observes Sooyoung's appearance more closely.

It's not unusual to see the older girl dressed up so nice, seeing as her wardrobe tends to be full of the most recent fashion trends and sponsored by the clothing brand that she models for. But today she looks a little nicer: there is a slight touch to her make-up that seperates this Sooyoung from the Sooyoung that walks around in their dorm bare-faced, the tint on her lips a shade darker than usual and the eyeliner on her eyes applied a little more heavily. She's wearing simple, elegant earrings that hang from her pierced ears and dangle in her straightened hair, and it makes her look all that much more expensive.

Jiwoo tilts her head curiously. "Unnie, are you going on a date?"

Sooyoung startles for a second, looking at her with wide eyes before she calms considerably. "I wouldn't call it that." Jiwoo notices the thoughtful look in her eyes and wonders what exactly the older girl gets up to whenever she's not in the dorm (she will usually leave with a short, "I'm heading out" or a "it's work" to serve as an explanation). "But yes, I am meeting someone."

"Ooh~" Jiwoo playfully cuddles up to the older girl's side, looking up at her with wide eyes. "Is it that handsome man from Friday night?"

As she had been walking back home from a night out with her friends, she had seen Sooyoung talking to a man nearby their dorm. He had been wearing a black tuxedo, with the buttons of his dress shirt slightly unbottoned so it revealed some skin on his chest. His hair had been gelled back into a neat, presentable hairstyle that revealed his handsome, mature face and sharp eyes that could make anyone fall to his feet. Sooyoung had been dressed in her usual, elegant attire that she wore whenever she went outside (a stark contrast to the casual clothing she wore in the dorm) and had been looking up at him with a troubled expression. But when she had seen Jiwoo approaching, she quickly bid farewell to the man and walked towards her.

The look that appears on the older girl's face is close to a grimace, like she doesn't like to think about the man at all. "I thought I told you to forget about him." She says coldly, eyes searching the street.

Jiwoo pouts at Sooyoung. "Why? He's very handsome." When she says nothing in response to that (in fact, she acts like she hasn't even heard her) Jiwoo charges on. "I think you and him would make a very nice couple, if you are dating, because he looks like he's rich and powerful and you look like you came straight out of a magazine 24/7 so it'd be like a celebrity couple, you know? In fact, I'm sure that your sister would be very happy to hear about you dating-"

"Jiwoo." Sooyoung warns, glaring at her from the corner of her eye.

Putting her hands up as a sign of peace, Jiwoo continues talking. "All I'm saying is that if you do decide to date, I'd support you." The words seem to be going into one ear and out the other as Sooyoung keeps walking like she doesn't have someone beside her. It makes Jiwoo a little frustrated, but then again, the older girl has always been sensitive to talk about personal topics. "Haseul-unnie has a boyfriend, and that doesn't change anything for us at the dorm. We still love her and she still loves us - honestly I'm kinda surprised that she stays at home so frequently, but who am I to judge? And Jinsoul-unnie goes out on all those blind dates, but we still cheer her on and help her choose her outfits because god knows that she's not very good with fashion... and even Jungeun has been flirting with that guy from dance class-"

"What are you trying to do here, Jiwoo-yah?" Sooyoung interrupts, an unreadable look on her face.

It takes her a little by surprise, because she hasn't seen this expression on the older girl's face since before she started warming up to them, when she was still rude and made it apparent that she didn't want to be there at all. But she supposes that she has kind of been pushing the sensitive topic a little too much, so she decides to take a different approach.

"We just want you to be happy, Unnie." She says, and the truth to the words show in the sincerity of her tone. " _I_ just want you to be happy. I still haven't told anyone about... you know, but after everything that you've been through, I think you deserve a little happiness."

Sooyoung seems to mull over the words for a while, quietly looking up at the bright, green leaves of the trees shading their path for them. "And you think I'll find it in... love?"

Jiwoo blinks. To be honest, she'd kind of been expecting Sooyoung to brush her off and change the topic, but instead she's indulging in it a little more and she's just letting the moment slip away... "Yeah, of course!" She hastily says, trying to remain positive. "Love makes people happy."

"Jiwoo, do I have to remind you that the reason why I was unhappy in the first place was _because_ of love?" Sooyoung deadpans, looking slightly amused at her suggestion like it's the most absurd thing she's ever heard.

She gapes a little, at loss for words. "Y-yeah, but that was..."

Sooyoung stops abruptly. Jiwoo's slightly surprised, but then dread fills her when she realises that she's cut the wrong wire. "That was different? Invalid?" Jiwoo presses her lips shut, trying to keep her place as the older girl takes a step closer to her, her height looming over her thanks to her heels that she's wearing and making her tilt her head a little so she can maintain eye contact. "Do you think that just because the... conditions were slightly different, it didn't make it love? That what I had was just some... childish thing?" The dark smirk that forms on Sooyoung's dark lips makes goosebumps rise on Jiwoo's skin, and she just tries not to cower in fear as the taller girl leans closer to her, her breath brushing against her skin as she talks lowly. "What is love, Jiwoo?"

When she started this conversation, she hadn't been intending for it to go down this route (in fact, she was pretty sure that neither of them ever wanted to mention what had happened that night) and now that she's here, she can't help but feel that weird feeling whenever she thinks about it inside of her. Does it make her a bad person?

"How naive..." Sooyoung chuckles, leaning back into her own space (Jiwoo lets out a breath she didn't know she was holding). She starts walking again, still looking as purposeful as she did when they left the dorm, but this time Jiwoo isn't as eager to follow her. "Hey, you seem to know a lot about love. Have you ever even kissed someone?"

Jiwoo can't help but take offense to the question and what it's implying, so she gasps and glares at the older girl. "O-of course I have!" Her cheeks are beginning to burn from where this conversation is going, and she can't help but stay a couple of steps behind Sooyoung in order to keep her dignity. "Do you not remember Seokwoo?"

Sooyoung glances at her with a surprised look on her face, her eyebrows tugging up in disbelief. "Him? I wouldn't have been expecting that."

"Why not?" She rushes to catch up to the other girl, her pride a little hurt.

"Didn't you spend a week crying over him because he wouldn't see you as anything other than innocent?" Sooyoung blatantly says, and Jiwoo feels her heart ache at the reminder. The older girl has always been harsh with her words, letting them out without a care in the world as to if it will hurt someone or not. Jiwoo had thought that she was used to it, but apparently not.

"I'm not just innocent!" She says shakily, her voice almost breaking under the weight of the sudden emotions that rush through her. "I'm twenty, I'm not some child that can't take care of herself."

At that, Sooyoung seems to realise that she's hurt her and softens considerably, her eyes showing that familiar kindness that she's grown fond of over their time in the Moon Dorm. "I never said that." When the tears don't leave her eyes, Sooyoung slips her hand into hers and tugs her closer. "Jiwoo, you know that I don't see you as a child - much less as someone _innocent_ after I caught you watching porn-"

"Unnie! You said we'd never talk about that!" Jiwoo is scandalised when she's reminded of the most mortifying moment she's ever lived (she's tried burying that memory somewhere deep, deep inside her mind with all the other embarrassing moments created in her twenty years of living).

"Who would've thought that Kim Jiwoo, resident 'Sunshine Girl', watches girl on g-"

"Unnie!" Her whole face is burning red by this point as she lunges to cover Sooyoung's mouth. She'd been talking pretty loudly, and having other people hear her porn preferences (especially such a controversial one, at that) will probably lead to her inevitable demise. Though that would probably get rid of the cursed image that she has pretty quickly.

Sooyoung is laughing to herself as she pries her wrist away from her mouth, a teasing smile on her face and a glint in her eye. "I'm just saying, it's kinda funny you're so boy crazy when the thing that really gets you off is..." Jiwoo considers jumping into the middle of on-coming traffic when Sooyoung wiggles her eyebrows at her, a look on her face that makes her feel inexplicable things. Really, all she wants to do is run away from this conversation and forget it ever happened.

"That was one time..." Jiwoo lies, trying to find an out to this topic.

Sooyoung laughs as if she's just remembered something, tightening her grip on her hand to keep her from pulling away in fear. "I think I should've seen it coming when you basically gave me a strip tease."

"I was _drunk_." She hisses through clenched teeth, though her mind immediately goes back to that... strange night.

"Don't worry, Jiwoo," the older girl lowers her voice and dips to whisper in her ear, "I know what you have under that pretty dress isn't innocent at all." Sooyoung gives her a look, and it takes all of the strength left in Jiwoo's body not to collapse onto the pavement then and there.

In order to save her dignity - and ironically her cursed image - Jiwoo shoves a cackling Sooyoung away and just tries to think about other things that _aren't_ Sooyoung and Sooyoung's body and Sooyoung's body under her hands and-

No, if anyone could hear her thoughts right now, they definitely wouldn't think she's innocent.

-

Jiwoo comes home tipsy, angry, and horny.

She pushes the front foor of the Moon Dorm open like it's her worst enemy (the old lady from the laundry store that always glares at her like she's some criminal) and kicks her shoes off violently, crashing them against the wall and making them fall onto the pile built up there.

"I'm home..." She mutters under her breath, never forgetting to say her routinely greeting.

"Oh, welcome home, unnie." Yerim smiles brightly at her from her place on the couch, cuddled up beside Heejin with stacks of papers surrounding them and their laptops placed dilligently on the coffee table.

Jiwoo considers crashing on the space beside her and laying her head in Heejin's lap (she was the best at giving head massages) and just ranting out her troubles, but she has a feeling that this is something the younger girl's can't help with. Or the older girls, Vivi and Jinsoul, who are showing each other something or other on their phone screens.

No, this is something only someone specific can help with.

She slightly stumbles up the steps into the living room (to which Jinsoul teases her about but she ignores) and looks around the dorm. "Where's Sooyoung-unnie?"

Yerim hums pensively, and Jiwoo has the urge to rush over to her and shake her by the shoulders to get the answer out of her. She really doesn't have the time for this. "Last I saw her, her and Hyejoo were in you guys' room-"

"Okay thanks."

She should really stop for a second, take time to breathe and get some water, maybe eat some food to sober herself up. But she keeps thinking back to what happened tonight and it makes her blood boil - it makes her so frustrated that she starts to see red and all she can think of is proving them wrong. Proving everyone wrong. That she's not just some innocent girl that should never be touched else she gets tainted by the horrors of the world because she's too childish, and immature, and weak to handle it - to handle any of it that any other girl her age can and should be able to handle by themselves because she's just as much human as they are and-

"Sooyoung-unnie." She bursts through the bedroom door with her face flushed and her vision swirling slightly. She's on autopilot and she doesn't think that Sober!Jiwoo is coming back any time soon.

"Jiwoo? What's wrong?" Sooyoung, in all her bare-faced and casually dressed glory, sits up from where she's laying in her bed and worriedly looks at her. Jiwoo drinks all of it in: the way her hair is tousled hair falls over one shoulder and her plump lips part slightly with unsaid words on her tongue and her long, bare legs fold on the white covers on the bed.

Jiwoo has never wanted anything more than in this moment.

She sees Hyejoo playing on her console in her own bed, headphones covering her ears as she doesn't even bother regarding her presence at all. Instead she continues to burn her eyes on the bright screen that flashes different images at her and Jiwoo needs to get her out of the room.

"Hyejoo, can I talk to Sooyoung-unnie in private?" She asks, her breath catching in her throat as she struggles to do the simple action of just inhaling and exhaling.

The younger girl barely looks up, her eyes too focussed on whatever game she's playing this time. "Yeah."

Jiwoo impatiently glares at her, feeling like there are tiny little ants underneath her skin that she just has to get rid of... the feeling that she needs to be touched or she'll go insane. "Hyejoo. Alone."

At that, Hyejoo seems to bother to raise her head and regard her with an equally irritated stare. "Why do I have to leave? Can't you just talk to her outside?"

Clenching her fists to stop herself from doing anything stupid in her drunken haze, Jiwoo maintains eye-contact with the rebellious girl. Hyejoo has always preferred to stay in her own space on her own, guarding it like a territorial animal and more often than not edging the rest of her roommates out of the room so she'll be by herself. Usually, Jiwoo won't mind and will be more than happy to comply to one of the girl's necessities, but right now she's the one with the necessity.

"Hyejoo, if you don't leave I'll tell Chaewon you steal her jumpers."

Praise the lord for Ha Sooyoung, Jiwoo thinks as the older girl steps in. She doesn't think that she would've ever been able to get Hyejoo out of the room if it weren't for the supposed blackmail that Sooyoung has on her, and she's almost surprised when the younger girl begrudgingly complies and starts gathering her things. She doesn't do so without grumbling curses and glaring at the both of them, kicking the door closed behind her with more force than necessary.

Jiwoo flinches slightly, but now that she realises that she's achieved her goal and is alone with her target, the feeling under her skin just seems to increase even more.

"What is it?" Sooyoung asks her, her bare legs now hanging off the side of her bed as she leans forward curiously. Before Jiwoo can even say anything, though, Sooyoung speaks up again. "Are you drunk?"

"What? No." She denies, already feeling her eyelids beginning to weigh more as she stares at Sooyoung's beautiful, tempting lips that she just wants to...

"Yes you are, you're doing it again." Sooyoung frowns, pointing her chin towards her vaguely. Jiwoo is entranced with the way her jawline becomes defined and sharp and even more attractive than usual. "Didn't you say you'd never drink again after what happened last time?"

Jiwoo remembers what happened last time. She remembers a heat coming over her body when she'd gotten home after a night out with her friends, and the fabric of her clothes being too uncomfortable on her skin for her to keep on. Sooyoung just happened to be in the room at that time, innocently doing whatever it was she was doing on her laptop, and became the center of her focus.

She thinks that the concern on Sooyoung's face makes her ten times hotter than usual, too. It's not the first time that Sooyoung has expressed her distaste for her drinking so often with her friends, especially since she's said how she doesn't trust any of them. Jiwoo has told her that there's no reason to worry about them, because even if she wanted anything to happen nothing ever would. Still, despite the slight jabs and snide comments that the older girl gives about her bad habits, she knows that she's only doing it because she cares.

Sooyoung cares.

She thinks that will be enough.

"What are you doing?" Sooyoung asks like she's talking to a child, an unimpressed expression on her face as she watches her move closer with a bored gaze.

But she's not a child. If she has to prove herself, then so be it.

"Jiwoo..." When the older girl's voice drops, it sends a thrill through her body. There's slight fear lacing her voice, and she's no longer looking at her the way that everyone else does - like she's something that can be broken at the mere misplacement of a touch. No, she looks more nervous than anything.

She can feel Sooyoung's body heat as she places her hands on her shoulders, ignoring the startled look that completely takes over the girl's face. It makes her feel good. "Unnie..." Her mind is spinning as she pushes closer, putting one of her knees on the mattress to stablaise her balance.

"Wh- Jiwoo- what the fuck-"

"Please, Unnie, I need this." There was a slight desperation rising from within her - something that was cultivated by the major insecurity that had grown inside of her all of this time. If Sooyoung turned her away right now - if she denied her touch and told her to leave - she didn't think she'd be able to live with herself anymore (a tad bit dramatic, but Jiwoo has been pushed to the very edge of her limits and she doesn't think she can take anymore).

Sooyoung hesitates for a second. Just sits there, gaping at her. Her eyes are wide, full of fear and confusion and other things that Jiwoo doesn't understand. The silence between them is tense, and Jiwoo feels like she'll literally burst into tears if she lets it settle any longer so she just-

And _god_ do Sooyoung's lips feel good against hers.

They're softer than she could've possibly imagined (and expected, from all those times wondering if it would feel the same kissing a girl as it did kissing a boy), sinking against the increasingly desperate pressure of her own mouth like the mattress giving way under her other knee that moves to straddle the older girl. She feels like her brain has just exploded in her skull and burst into a bright nebula and she can _see_ so much that she couldn't before - like how Sooyoung possibly has the softest lips on earth and how much she's actually been waiting for this moment like it's her last. It's surprising how easy it is to glide her lips cross the slightly chapped surface, and she finds that her heart beats a little faster every time she does so, so she repeats the motion again.

But Sooyoung's shoulders are tense under her hands, and her lips are immobile against hers, and all of a sudden her insecurities are shooting through her chest and she pulls away with a lump in her throat.

"I'm sorry-" Jiwoo can hear her voice break at the unreadable expression on Sooyoung's face and she feels like she's the least desirable thing to have ever existed and _why doesn't anyone want her-_

Sooyoung's hand is what pulls her back in, grabbing at the back of her neck to keep her there.

Jiwoo literally melts when Sooyoung kisses her back. The tension in her body completely washes away and she finds herself dissolving in the other girl's lap from the initial relief. Her thoughts are stilled and her mind is cleared.

But then she feels a hand grip at her thigh and the atmosphere changes.

A heat washes over her and her skin is suddenly on fire and she just wants Sooyoung's hands all over her body - she wants her body on her body - so she tries to press herself closer than before to feel her better - to feel her everywhere. She feels the hand on her leg tightening its grip at the same time Sooyoung gives a sharp inhale through her nose, the sound loud in the quiet room, and she positively feels the desire inside of her growing greedily.

Her hands have a mind of their own: crumpling the pajama shirt to try to contain her emotions, before feeling the smooth skin on a hot neck and mindlessly searching for more skin, exploring the entrance in the back of the shirt and gliding into it to move over Sooyoung's back. Sooyoung's chin hits hers in the midst of trying to find a better angle, and she uses the time to try to breathe before delving back into the kiss more eagerly - as if she were diving under water. The hand that had previously been at her neck slides down to her hip, squeezing as she involuntarily hums and encouraging her to press even closer than before, urging a sharp gasp from the older girl.

Every time Jiwoo pulls, Sooyoung pushes. Her hands keep her from losing balance and falling out of her lap, though they also prompt her hips to grind against hers and she feels her jaw slacking at the new sensation.

It's sobering.

Very sobering.

One of Sooyoung's hand is sliding up her shirt and faintly scratching at her stomach and _oh my god she's kissing a girl_ -

When Jiwoo goes to pull away (already panicking at the realisation that _she's doing something gay_ ), Sooyoung dazedly follows after her and traps her lower lip between her teeth and really - who wouldn't make the sound she makes when there's a _literal model_ is biting your lip?

This seems to spur Sooyoung on, her hand guiding her hips once more and sending a sharper sensation up her spine than last time. The grip that the older girl has on her is strong, and the way that she's dragging her nails on her skin to leave faint marks is possessive.

Jiwoo has never felt this wanted before.

Someone wants her.

 _Sooyoung_ wants her.

The thought is just enough to get intoxicated over, and there are suddenly tears slipping down her face and Sooyoung pulls away immediately when she realises.

They're both panting heavily, but Jiwoo sees the way Sooyoung's pupils are dilated and the look of immediate worry and concern and out of no where she's bursting into tears in the older girl's lap like a little kid. The least she can do is cover her face with her hands, too ashamed to show her face after everything. It's all too overwhelming (never had she thought that she'd kiss a girl after judging Sooyoung about her sexuality) and all of the emotions that are fuelled by her insecurities and alcohol are making her more irrational than usual.

"Wh-what's wrong?" Sooyoung's slightly out of breath, but she still gently guides her off and sits her on the bed. Jiwoo is crying too hard to actually see what's happening, but she does feel arms being wrapped around her shoulders.

"I-I..." No words come to her when she thinks about explaining anything to the older girl, only thoughts about what happened earlier tonight that make her feel even worse. "Am I ugly?"

Sooyoung is stunned into silence at the question, and Jiwoo just takes that as confirmation, sobbing harder into her hands. "What? No!" There's anger tinting her voice, and then her hands are prying at her wrists to remove her own from shielding her face. "Who the fuck said that?"

Jiwoo doesn't answer, because no one actually said that. But after being turned down so many times, and her first serious relationship ending just because she was too innocent to touch, she can't help but feel ugly. Like the things that people have been telling her are just condolences to make her feel better and that no one will actually ever want her the way that she wants to be wanted.

"Jiwoo, who the _fuck_ said that?" Sooyoung looks really, really mad. Jiwoo has seen Angry!Sooyoung before, and she admits that she's terrified of that version of her, but now that she's getting angry over her it isn't as bad. "I'm going to tear who ever told you that to pieces."

Shaking her head, Jiwoo just tries to move closer to Sooyoung, weakly wrapping her arms around her.

Sooyoung cares about her. Sooyoung makes her feel wanted.

"No, no one said that." She whispers, resting her chin on Sooyoung's shoulder.

The older girl reluctantly accepts her comment, pulling her to her by the waist. "Is that what you think of yourself?" Sooyoung has always been good at inferring things from her environment (something Jiwoo had been wary about at first) and it doesn't really surprise her when she catches on. She doesn't have the strength to admit it out loud, but she thinks that the silence is enough to serve as an answer. "Why would you think that?"

Jiwoo hesitates.

She doesn't want to sound stupid.

If she admitted it, would that stop Sooyoung from wanting her?

Most likely - it would make her sound really childish.

But then again, it's Sooyoung. The girl has always treated her like anyone else.

"No one wants me." Her voice trembles. "They tell me I'm too innocent."

When Sooyoung's grip on her falters her heart drops to her stomach. But then she's being pulled back onto Sooyoung's lap and there are arms tightly wound around her waist and a chin resting on her temple as her head rests against a comfortable shoulder. It feels comforting - especially after she thought she was going to get pushed away.

"Jiwoo, listen to me when I tell you this," Sooyoung nudges her chin against her head to make sure she's listening to her, and Jiwoo closes her eyes as tears well up again, "you are the most beautiful person ever-" it feels fake, "-anyone that doesn't want you is obsiously missing some braincells, okay?"

A slight laugh bubbles out of her chest, and she can't help the warmth that comes with it.

"What happened tonight?" Sooyoung asks tentatively, and Jiwoo is grateful that she's being so careful with her words despite everything.

"Uhm... my date ditched me for another girl..." Jiwoo says, her heart aching at the memory of it. It's terribly embarrassing now that she says it outloud.

Sooyoung seems to clench her jaw at her words, and her arms hold her tighter than before. "Yeah, well, he's a fucking idiot." Jiwoo can feel the anger in her voice as her throat trembles from the slight growl that comes along with it, and she vaguely shakes her head. "He doesn't know what he's missing out on, I swear to you."

Just then, the bedroom door swings open and Hyejoo is stepping through with her console in her hand and the same annoyed expression from before on her face. "Okay, Yeojin and Jinsoul-unnie were getting too annoying so I've had enough of being banished from my own room..."

She stops in her tracks when she sees them on Sooyoung's bed, hugging each other while Jiwoo hiccups through her tears, and awkwardly blinks at them. The two of them just stare back at her, not prepared for the sudden interruption (Jiwoo is grateful that she didn't come in five minutes earlier).

"Uh... is Jiwoo-unnie okay?" She at least has the decency to ask, though she looks incredibly tense.

Jiwoo wipes at her tears with the heels of her hands and smiles at the younger girl. "When you get older, don't drink, Hyejoo-yah." She jokes lightly, already moving out of Sooyoung's hold (she ignores the feeling inside telling her to stay there forever).

"She's fine, the alcohol just got to her emotions." Sooyoung plays into the excuse, though her hand squeezes at her arm before she's out of reach.

Hyejoo nods, eyes darting between the two of them before settling on the ceiling. "Ooookay... I just wanted to say that Hyunjin-unnie just got out of the shower."

"Are you telling me I smell?" Jiwoo teases, watching as the younger girl visibly relaxes.

"Yeah, go take a shower, Unnie." Hyejoo scrunches her nose and easily dodges her hit.

Jiwoo giggles, grabbing some spare clothes and a towel before disappearing from the room. As soon as she's in the hallway, her brain goes haywire.

Sooyoung will _definitely_ not think she's innocent after that.


	3. welcome

Jungeun comes back to the dorm feeling positively dead and wanting to collapse on her bed already.

Her bag is heavy on her back, full of books from the classes that she had that morning and clothes that she changed into when she went to the dancing academy, so her shoulders are screaming by the time she throws the weight off and unlocks the door into the dorm. She fumbles awkwardly for a second, trying to handle the keys to the door, her phone and her wallet all at once, having taken them out of her bag to try and alleviate some of the burden. (It hadn't really done much, but she had convinced herself that it was enough to get her through the trek back from the bus stop.)

It takes her around five minutes until she gives up and drops her phone and wallet onto her bag, though she does so too clumsily and the phone slides off and slaps the stone stairs. All she does is stare at the back of it, the animated stickers plastered on her case grinning back up at her mockingly, and really considers jumping off their little patio and letting her head smack against the nice stones lining the pathway up to the house.

The door swings open promptly afterwards, and Jungeun finds herself staring at the face of Haseul's little sister.

"Oh? It's Kim Jungeun-ssi." The small girl greets, the innocent curiosity playing on her face doing nothing to soothe the burst of irritation that passes through Jungeun's veins at the sound of her full name. (She had specifically told her other roommates that she'd prefer not to be called by her real name, for obvious reasons, though it seems that the teenager pays no mind to her requests at all.) "What are you doing here?"

Jungeun, despite all her inner ranting and annoyance, shuffles awkwardly at the threshold of the door as if she were a guest anticipating being welcomed into someone else's living space. "Uh... I-uh, I live here." Her sentence lilts at the end and ends up coming out as a question, and she really doesn't understand why she's so unsure of herself when she's the one who applied to live there and is currently paying the rent while the teenager is the one who constantly makes herself welcome into the building as if its her kingdom.

"Oh yeah." Yeojin bounces in place like she's just remembered the minute detail that Jungeun has been living in the dorm for the past month and a half, and begins to grin widely. "Come in, Kim Jungeun-ssi. You shouldn't be standing out in the cold for so long."

Wanting to narrow her eyes at the deliberate use of her full name but instead robotically picking up her belongings, Jungeun shuffles past the small girl and does her best not to make any physical contact with her. She doesn't mention how she's the one that's older than her, and that she should technically be taking care of her instead (considering her pocket-size stature and strange regard for wearing multiple small buns) but she's never really had anyone call her 'unnie' or 'noona'. (Not for any lack of want, more for a lack of courage when getting those who should be addressing her respectfully as such.)

The dorm living room is as bare as always, only having four pieces of furniture and those being the bare necessities: a moderately sized couch, where her dance junior, Hyunjin, and the first dorm member, Heejin, sit together; a TV that hangs from the wall, playing some entertaining variety program that Jungeun is actually interested in but hasn't watched since moving into the dorm for fear of being too intrusive on the other girls; a small dining table, where the oldest roommate sits studying on her pink laptop with matching set of headphones one, looking very concentrated; and a coffee table flooded with several empty packets of an array of snacks and books piled on top of one another, and Jungeun just wants to go over and flip the table onto its side and be rid of the sight already.

Heejin and Hyunjin turn their head to see who it is that Yeojin seems to be welcoming so haphazardly into their dorm, but return their attention to the TV once they realize its their other roommate. (Heejin has the decency to give her a tentative smile, which Jungeun is too confused as to how to react over to return.)

She holds her sigh of frustration when she reaches her bedroom, throwing her things onto the surface before collapsing onto it exactly how she had been visualizing in her head her whole journey back. It's been a month and a half, and she has yet to have a proper conversation with any of her four other roommates that consisted of anything aside from if she was going to do her laundry that morning or if it had been her assignment that had caught fire while Heejin was trying to cook. (It was, but she hadn't wanted to make the younger girl feel bad so she had lied and said it wasn't.)

Before she realizes it, she's asleep with her face pressed against her wallet and her books pressing uncomfortably into her stomach from the insides of her bag.

She wakes up the following morning with a growling stomach, a dry throat and the imprint of her wallet on her cheek. _Classy_.

The dorm is quiet when she steps out of her room (shuffles blindly while trying to take off shoes that she had forgotten to take off in her haste to reach the comfort of her room), though it's not like she expected anything since she tended to be the one who woke up the earliest.

(This was something she had discovered as she was mindlessly cooking herself some breakfast and lunch one morning, and an irritated Vivi had walked into the kitchen and had told her to "stop making enough sound to wake up my parents in Hong Kong" under her breath, before reaching for a box of cereals and roughly bumping into her in the process.

Yep. Not a memory Jungeun enjoyed reliving.)

Mindful of every other Moon Dorm resident, Jungeun quietly goes about her business. It's become a talent of hers to glide around the house as if she's completely weightless, not making a sound at all even as she takes a warm, yet quick, shower in the bathroom farthest from Room 1.

She has everything ready and packed in her bag, which she lugs with her around the house to make her exit clean and effective, when she steps into the kitchen in search for the sandwich she bought herself the morning before. Dazedly searching through the labeled items in the fridge with the other girls' names and personalized stickers for each one of them, she scavenges for the plain sticky note reading her stage name plastered onto her sandwich.

Not only does she not find it, but she hears a squeak behind her that sends her jumping a couple of feet into the air and knocking a few things over from the shelves in the fridge.

Jungeun turns to find wide, agitated eyes digging into her face, and it's not anyone that she knows.

She takes in the blindingly bleached blonde hair looking like a lion's mane around a round face, cheeks filled out with food and what she thinks looks suspiciously like the sweet barbecue sauce that was advertised on the sandwich packet that she bought the previous day. Jungeun still has no idea who the girl is, and why she looks like she's just slept over in the dorm and why she's even in the dorm in the first place (should she be reporting this to the landowner? The police?) but she sees the incriminating sticky-note on the counter of the kitchen and the blatant evidence of her sandwich in the girl's hands and her heart drops straight out of her ass.

Honestly, the way university life is going for her so far, Jungeun just wants the Grim Reaper to rise and take her soul already.

She wants to say something (preferably shout about why the hell she's eating the only sandwich that would keep her going through the day) but her she feels the familiar cotton texture sticking her tongue to the roof of her mouth and all she can do is stare blankly at her would-be-breakfast like it's betrayed her.

Sighing, she lets the fridge door close and she wordlessly picks her bag up from the floor, heaving it onto her back and leaving the kitchen without as much as a sound. She's sure that she can check if she has some spare change to buy herself ramen on her way back from the dance academy.

(She prays that she has spare change, otherwise she's going to have to go a day without eating.)

-

"Thank you for the ride." Jungeun bows full ninety-degrees, her cheeks burning from the shame, and she's not sure if it's because she's apologizing or because she's grateful.

Her senior in terms of dance academy ranking, though equal in terms of age and grade, Mark, gives a half-amused, half-awkward laugh. "No, thank you for putting up with this lame bicycle. I'm sure you were expecting more when I offered a ride." He purses his lips unsurely, eyes dancing around just as his feet do when she sees him dance at the academy.

"N-no, you've done more than you should have- I mean, you really shouldn't have been so nice, I don't know how I'm going to repay you..."

Mark rolls his eyes slightly, but the bright grin remains planted on his face like the trademark it is. "Don't stress over it, anyone else would have done the same as me."

 _No, they really wouldn't have_ , Jungeun thinks to herself but says nothing at all.

"Besides, it would be really stupid of me to let a girl walk all the way home by herself in the dark." He says it easily, like it's a basic law that has been ingrained into him, and Jungeun is honestly fascinated by his kind-hearted nature. "Especially in a city like Seoul, damn. I don't think I'd ever feel safe if I were a woman."

"Even if it means letting a potential psychopath into your home?" Jungeun mumbles thoughtlessly, the words escaping her mouth before she can even think about stopping them. When she registers what she's just said, she almost slaps her face with her open hand. (This is exactly why she limits her interactions to simple nods of acknowledgement or two word greetings.)

Surprisingly, Mark lets out a bubble of laughter that sends his head tossing backwards. "Come on, don't tell me that the cute-character-lover Kim Lip is secretly an axe murdering psychopath."

Jungeun feels the blush across her cheeks at the small jest and does her best to curl in on herself. (Maybe if she tries hard enough she can compartmentalize her body into a tiny, tiny cube that no one will be able to see.) "You know I like those?" As if her mild obsession with stickers from when she was in high school couldn't get even more embarrassing.

He stumbles over his words a little, before sheepishly grinning at her. "Yeah, they're all over your phone case and bag." Pointing to her belongings, Mark rests the weight of his bicycle onto his leg. "They're pretty hard to miss. Trust me, I'm not a stalker." Shaking his hands in denial, he widens his eyes.

A giggle manages to fall from Jungeun's lips, and this time she doesn't feel so bad about it. "Are you sure? I'm pretty sure I saw you staring at Lisa-sunbaenim just the other day."

"What? No I wasn't!" Despite his words, the tips of his ears begin to tint a bright shade of red and it completely gives away his embarrassment.

Jungeun had never thought she'd be presented with the opportunity to see Mark's smile up close, not only because of her socially-awkward being but because the boy was extremely popular in the academy, and it's pretty difficult to get a hold of him. She'd been very suspicious when he had woken her up from where she had passed out alone in the practice room and had told her that he'd take her home -- even more suspicious when he had suggested the idea of heading back to his house when they realised that a ride back to the Moon Dorm from the dance academy would take them more than an hour. (It had been very awkward having to meet his parents and brother the very first day they actually had a conversation, but it had made her feel safer than if it were just the two of them.)

"I will pay you back for troubling you." Jungeun bows deeply again, feeling guilty for everything that has occurred in the past several hours. Had she not been so irresponsible to let herself take a 'short nap' while practicing after-hours, she wouldn't have had to trouble his mother into making extra breakfast just for her, or borrow clothes from her.

Despite everything, Mark only chuckles to himself and puts his helmet back on. "Seriously, don't worry about it." There's a more serious tinge to his expression as he says the next couple of words. "You can pay me back by coming out with the rest of us for drinks on Saturday, if you want." Nervously, he rubs the back of his neck and makes a face that looks like he's going to regret saying the next sentences. "You know, get out of that image that you're so calm and cool? I mean- it's really only intimidating for a while until you notice the stickers and the slight awkwardness, but even sometimes it's still a little..."

Jungeun frowns, more in confusion than in offense.

People think she's intimidating? They think that she she's calm and cool?

God, she has never wanted to laugh more in her life.

"Sure." Once again, the words leave her before she can really register them, and the dread of having to attend a social gathering hits her. Already, her mind is thinking of excuses to get her out of the compromise. ('I have an assignment due midnight Sunday that I completely forgot about' or 'I lost all of my clothes so I can't dress up to go out-' no, that one's stupid.)

Mark gives a relieved grin (which makes her think that maybe he wants her to be there after all) and fixes his bag on his shoulders. "Cool. I'll text you the details on Instagram."

Jungeun nods shyly, before watching him take off and cycle down the fairly empty street.

Her shoulders sag as soon as he disappears from her line of view, feeling completely emotionally drained from having to have that many human interactions in one day.

She starts to think that she misses her dorm, but the more she thinks about it, the more she realizes that it's not really her dorm that she misses but the physical piece of furniture that suffices as her bed. Spending so much time outside of the dorm, in the presence of someone who makes conversation with her that lasts more than a minute, makes her come to terms with a fact that she has been trying her hardest to deny: the Moon Dorm doesn't feel like a home. It isn't a place she can go to and completely forget about everything else that's happening in the world, and the realization saddens her a little, but it relieves her of the unknown figurative burden she had been carrying.

Jungeun's fingers shake as she takes out her phone from her pocket and goes to the obligatory group chat that the Moon Dorm residents share.

**Jo Haseul added +82 XX XXXX XXXX to Moon Dorm**

**[21:22] Jo Haseul:** That's Jinsoul's number, you guys should put it down in your phones

 **[21:27] Kim Hyunjin** : okau

 **[21:51] Jeon Heejin:** already saved

**Jeon Heejin sent an image. Tap to view.**

**[21:52] +82 XX XXXX XXXX** : awwww, cuuuuuuuute

 **[21:52] Jeon Heejin:** <3

She wants to laugh, and she allows a small bitter smirk to play on her face as she stares at the conversation, but she restrains herself from reacting too much. It takes her a couple of minutes, but she manages to stop the train of thought chugging eagerly away to 'So we have a new roommate that I was never told about and they've already made her feel more welcome than they have for me oh look they didn't say anything about me not coming home last night how fun' land.

Jungeun deserves a cookie.

-

The rest of her week continues in the same monotonous fashion: wake up before anyone else in the dorm, attend her classes at uni while trying to survive on small packets of snacks she can barely afford, then rush to catch the bus to go to the dance academy, where she'll stay a little later than anyone (even though lately Mark has been using the excuse that he needs more practice - _lies_ \- so she's not entirely alone) before getting the last bus that'll take her to a hopefully quiet dorm.

However, with the new addition of Jung Jinsoul (Jungeun had come to learn her name when she had read the welcome letter in the mailbox one morning), there seems to be an... unbalance in the scales; a disturbance in the easy routine Jungeun had come to know.

She wakes up at what Jo Haseul calls "an un-godly hour" to get a headstart on her day (admittedly mostly to try and avoid any unnecessary interactions with any of the other residents) and go about her own business in peace. Except that's not what happens when she opens the door to the farthest bathroom from Room 1 as she usually would have done for her morning shower. Instead of finding the comfort of the small yet empty bathroom with the purple tinge of light streaming through the opaque window, she comes face to face with a shirtless blonde girl.

As if repeating their first encounter, the girl lets out a squeak of what seems to be surprise, wide eyed and hair still resembling that of a lion's mane.

Jungeun simply stares, trying to think if she's still dreaming and has slept through her alarm and this is a way that her subconscious is trying to tell her - warn her - that she'll be late, or if what she's seeing is - in fact - real.

Sure, it may not be the greatest first impression, simply staring at your shirtless roommate without saying anything and without even so much as blinking. But in Jungeun's defence, in the time that she had been living there no one had used that bathroom but her so she'd somewhat grown territorial over that space. Having someone else suddenly _trespass_ -

"I..." Jung Jinsoul goes to say something, the beginning of a sentence on her tongue, but Jungeun's already wordlessly stepping back out of the bathroom and closing the door again.

She tries not to let the inconvenience throw her off. She tries not let the thought of someone else being in her space bother her ( _yes_ , she'd noticed the new blue tinted bedsheets on the bed closest to hers along with the heavy addition of clothes in the wardrobes). It doesn't annoy her as much as it would have if she were in a bad mood...

If she's more careless than usual while continuing her early morning routine in the bathroom right beside Room 1, it's only because the surprise appearance had shaved a couple of minutes - _important_ minutes - of her time and she's in a rush to get to her morning classes. Really, if she drops her shampoo bottle more times than usual it's only because the water from this shower seems to make her hands a little slippier. And the song she's currently learning the dance to is only blasting so loudly from her phone because they're having a performance soon and she wants to run through the coreography in her head as much as possible.

Jungeun's already shrugged her clothes on by the time one of the other girl's is pounding against the bathroom door - Jo Haseul's irritated face greets her, leading the entourage of other girls residing in Room 1 who look equally, if not more, pissed at being woken so early - and she brushes past them without a word.

"Jungeun-ssi-"

Haseul's cold voice snapping at her so early in the morning makes everything in her brain want to scream bloody murder.

She doesn't say anything to their incensed expressions.

(If her bag hits Vivi's shoulder a little on her way past, she blames it on gravity.)

She doesn't meet Jung Jinsoul's paled expression as she stands in the middle of the living room. She has nothing to do with her or with any of the other girls in that dorm.

-

"So... how's life in Seoul?"

Jungeun stares at the face of her childhood best friend currently being displayed on her phone. Jiwoo's features are a little grainy because the quality of her screen isn't the best and her face is awkwardly split down the middle from where she'd dropped it a couple of days ago (it serves its basic function of making calls) but Jungeun takes whatever she can get at the moment.

"Okay." She replies absent-mindedly. The wistful feeling that had been lodged in her chest is acting up a little and she's trying her best to wrangle it into submission so it leaves the state of her throat alone.

"Jungie..." She feels the disapproval more than hears it. Jiwoo's previously bright grin from retelling her own experiences in their hometown has dimmed into her 'I've known you for _years_ and you _still_ think your lies will sneak past me' frown. "What's wrong? You're not failing your classes are you? Cause I know that you kinda absolutely bombed your math exam back in high school-"

"It was _one_ test, and the whole class failed."

"-but you're pretty good at studying. Better than I ever was, but you won't be hearing me say that again, you know? I'm only saying it just this once because it's my duty as your best friend to remind you how good you are." Jiwoo has always had a tendancy to ramble, and Jungeun will usually interrupt her flow as seamlessly as moving into the next step of a dance, but she hasn't heard her best friend's voice in a while and she thinks that listening to her voice will be enough to quell the homesickness. "Jungie, if any of us deserved to go to Seoul on that scholarship, _it's you_. I didn't have to put up with your annoying ass - I bought you so much coffee - for you to suddenly start doubting yourself. So you better put your chin up and you better crush that economics degree like its Woo Seongha's bitchy face."

That gets a laugh out of Jungeun.

It's more breath than sound, but the corners of her lips lift almost unfamiliarly enought that the skin at her cheeks strain.

"You still see her around?" Jungeun asks Jiwoo, who glares at her with certainty and determination. It's enough to give her energy to power her through the day, surely.

As if having set off a firework, Jiwoo lights up with a rage so familiar that Jungeun finds herself settling against the pillow at her back. "Still- still _see her around_?!" Her ears slightly ache from the loud volume of her best friend's voice being blasted by her earphones, but she doesn't do so much as flinch. "Do you know how many times we've had to change parking spaces because she keeps stealing ours? I swear, even Yeri is planning to puncture her tyres..."

Jungeun lets herself listen to Jiwoo animatedly retell the story of how their mortal enemy does the tiniest of things to inconvenience them all. It's wildly reminiscent of when the two of them would sit together on Jiwoo's bed and talk about whatever had annoyed them that day. Except now Jungeun is sat on her own bed miles away in Seoul while Jiwoo lays comfortably on her own.

It takes her a while to wind down, and when she does Jungeun is so out of it she barely notices that there's no endless ranting in her ears anymore.

"What's really wrong, Jungie?" Jiwoo's voice is almost uncharacteristally soft, enough to pull Jungeun out of whatever faraway land she'd been in. "You don't look... is Seoul not what you expected?"

That makes Jungeun think.

"It's not that..." Jungeun mulls, quietly stewing over the question.

Seoul had been everything Jungeun had been expecting and more. She was getting herself a degree from a good university without burdening her parents with the task of having to pay fully for her tuition. She was doing what she loved most on the side - dance had always been her passion ever since she had been presented to performances on TV. The city itself was beautiful in its own ways, and the scenery was what she liked.

"It would be so much better if you were here," she says.

Jiwoo blinks at her, her face blank as she registers the words properly.

At that moment, the door to her room opens. It startles her enough the she cradles her phone to her chest almost protectively, not wanting anyone to invade any more of her privacy that had already been taken from her. (The encounter at the showers the other day had only made the living situation frostier than it had already been.) She feels a sharp sensation shooting through her chest as she's pulled from the comfort bubble she'd built while talking to Jiwoo.

Tentatively, Jung Jinsoul steps into the room. There's a sheepish smile on her face as she does so, like she's apollogetic for interrupting her conversation at all. Jungeun thinks she sees her smile threatening to fall.

"Sorry, I just need to get something..."

"Jungeun?" Jiwoo, confused out of her wits, calls out her name. "Is that your roommate?"

Jungeun continues to stare blankly at Jinsoul, who in response just stands at the doorway with her hand on the door handle and her eyes a little too wide to be normal. In comparison to how she's seen her before (wild, dishevelled, just rolled out of her bed and shirtless), Jinsoul manages to look more put together when it's a time past seven in the morning.

Her eyes briefly scan the blonde's appearance and she manages to hold back a grimace. As put together as the girl's fashion sense will allow her to be, anyway.

"Is that... okay?" Jinsoul prods, shuffling on her feet unsurely.

Jiwoo pipes up from where she had been straining to hear for traces of conversation. "Why does she sound scared?" Her voice is loud, and it almost makes Jungeun jump in her place on her bed. "Is she scared of you? Are you making that face again? Jungeun don't scare your roommates, they-"

Feeling the beginning of what feels like the worst headache forming in her mind, Jungeun places the now dark phone on her red bedsheets. The last thing she wants is Jiwoo reprimanding her of her relations with her roommates. She knows herself how much she's screwed everything up with them - she wonders how none of them have shaved her hair off in her sleep - and she's been considering looking for a new place to move into. Then she'll be able to start anew, and maybe then it'll be easier to make a good first impression so that the people she lives with won't hate her.

When Jinsoul swallows nervously, her throat makes the motion of bobbing. "I'll... take that as a 'yes'."

The blonde begins to look through her belongings at the new desk that resides between both of their beds. Jungeun is not entirely sure where the piece of furniture came from (considering much of the dorm remains undecorated, as if anticipating its inhabitants to move out sooner or later), but she has an inkling the girl with designer shoes laying tidily under her blue bed has something to do with it. Not that Jungeun is bothered by the addition, considering it makes the room feel a little homier.

"Can I move this?"

Jungeun looks to where Jinsoul is slightly crouched, holding onto the strap of her bag.

She'd forgotten that she'd perched it there in the first place, and she hastily moves to apologise for the inconvenience. "Yeah, sorry."

It's when Jinsoul begins to lift at the strap, clinging desperately by its last threads to its position, the words "it's okay, I got it" slipping from her mouth, that the bag breaks. It falls to the floor with a heavy thump of textbooks and a laptop making contact with the hard wood.

Jungeun freezes from where she's half-in, half-out of her bed. Jinsoul is also rooted to her place, her skin paling to a color that should be worrisome.

"Oh my god." It should make her feel better: the fact that Jinsoul's voice cracks like she's absolutely devestated that she just broke the only bag that Jungeun owns. It should make her feel better that the blonde is now scrambling to pick up what's left of the bag so delicately, as if dealing with a newborn. Maybe all of the apologies endlessly falling from her lips should make her feel better.

Except that without a bag, she can't carry all of her textbooks and her laptop and her dance clothes. Except that she'd been given that bag by her parents when she was halfway through highschool and it had her favourite character stickers decorating it and it had basically become a part of her. It had been like an extra limb that she always - _always_ \- carried around with her. And it had reminded her of all the times Jiwoo had tried putting a stray cat into it, or had hidden her contraband of food on their way to school, or had pasted her own addition of stickers.

No. It's fine.

Jungeun breathes through her nose.

She'll just buy a new one. (Even if that means she doesn't get to eat proper food for a couple of days.)

"...didn't mean for that to happen, god, I'm so stupid," Jinsoul rambles, trying to inspect the strap and where it used to connect to its main body. "I swear I fuck everything up... I was just trying to help, oh my god, why can't I get anything right?"

Maybe its because it reminds her a little of Jiwoo, the way she just talks through her panic, but Jungeun huffs a little and gently places her hand over the blonde's shaking ones. "Don't worry about it."

(Jungeun ignores the way Jinsoul has stopped breathing.)

Worriedly, Jungeun unzips the bag and checks its contents. Her heart tries to leap out of the cosmos when she checks that the order of placement _is_ heavy textbooks at the top and old laptop at the very bottom where the bag had fallen at an angle. She's not religious, but she prays to whatever god she can muster into her thoughts as she peels her precious laptop from its place. If it _has_ broken, this isn't something she can replace. She barely has money to feed herself every day, how is she supposed to repair a broken laptop?

Jinsoul is with her, peering with baited breath over her shoulder, when she opens her laptop.

The screen is cracked, but it's nothing she can't get used to.

When she presses the power button is when they get the real news.

The screen blinks an unfamiliar rich blue, interswapping with flashes of white, before blacks lines dance across the screen and then stays like that.

...

Right.

Jungeun's will to live disappears along with whatever fucks she had left to give.

-

In spite of recent events, Jungeun still lets herself be dragged to the bar Mark had been mentioning to her over the course of the week. She had _almost_ decided to fluke and wallow in her self-pity for a couple more hours until the urge to strangle her roommate disappeared. (Jinsoul takes the hint when Jungeun glares at her with tears barely kept at bay, her own set of puppy eyes (she had no right to be giving her that look) and has been giving her a wide berth. If she'd seen the blonde sleeping on the couch when she'd woken up so early even Jinsoul wasn't awake, then she doesn't remember it.) But Mark had appeared at the dorm two hours early to make sure she didn't do just that.

Now she's with her dance group at an unfamiliar bar in Seoul, and it's surprising how comforting the increasing numbness the soju gives her. They'd been a little hesitant to greet her with the same warmth as they did Mark when she'd appeared with him, but the more attention she payed to them instead of hiding her gaze on the ground, the more she realised that what made them hesitate was more shyness than anything.

Which had disappeared after just a couple of rounds of drinking.

"Drink if you have ever... skipped curfew because you were too busy graffitiing a monobrow onto a wall painting."

"That's weirdly specific, Lucas." Yoohyeon, a senior who she admired for her sharp dancing and ability to make anything look good as long as she moved her limbs, laughs beside her, leaning into her for support.

There's a small grin on Jungeun's face as Lucas, a boy the same age as her and Mark who had joined just after she had yet managed to integrate himself into the group easier, slumps slightly onto the table. He's only had a couple of drinks but he already looks too far gone for even the older boy who they look to as a leader of their small dance team, Jaehyun.

"You're such a lightweight, Wong. Change it to 'drink if you have ever skipped curfew'." Mark mends, on the other side of Jungeun but handling himself far better than what appears to be his close friend. There's that trademark grin on his face that keeps growing more and more familiar every time they interact, which is not something Jungeun will complain about. It makes her settle more comfortably in her stool as people around her raise small glasses to their lips unabashedly.

She thinks that no one has noticed when Jun, a boy from China yet the oldest of the group, lets out a whoop of surprise. "Kim Lippie has skipped curfew before? _The_ Kim Lippie?" Everyone at the table turns to look at her with surprise, though Lucas lets out a string of what appears to be his mother tongue and is talking sluggishly to Jun, who just ignores him and instead presses for more answers. "When, who, what, where, and how? Right now."

Jungeun laughs to herself, and Yoohyeon manages to slap her thigh as if to reprimand her. "I expected better from you, my _deongsaeng_."

The alcohol makes her feel light, so she doesn't think there'll be any issue as she starts retelling the story of how her, Jiwoo, and the rest of their high school entourage decided it would somehow be a good idea if they went to the mountain in their town to set off fireworks to celebrate one of their friend's achievements. She exaggerates a little when she retells the story of Jiwoo getting caught in their friend's mistake, saying that all of her hair was singed when in reality it had only left Jiwoo with a bob she hated for the rest of the year. At least it had made the girl appreciate her hair more.

It makes the rest of the dance crew laugh like its the funniest thing in the world, and the rush that courses through her in response makes tears gather in her eyes from the laughter.

That's how she knows she's a little out of it.

When Yoohyeon gets out to go to the bathroom, Jungeun pushes herself up and offers to go with her despite her assuring that she can go with one of the seniors hanging out at another table. It's not like Jungeun doesn't see the accomplished grin that graces Yoohyeon's face when she joins her, their arms looped together.

On their way there, she catches sight of a flash of blonde, and in light of recent events it makes her turn towards it.

She thinks that she's hallucinating for a moment when she sees what she thinks is Jinsoul sitting across from a guy, looking almost as uncomfortable as she had whenever Jungeun was in the same vecinity as she was. Which is pretty damn uncomfortable, if Jungeun's heavy glares and moody aura are effective at all.

"Unnie, wait a minute." She pats Yoohyeon's hand, though the other girl is already distractedly talking to a group of other dancers from their company.

Weaving through the tables of drunk customers as easily as if she were sober, Jungeun approaches the table where Jinsoul is sat. Sure enough, the blonde is wearing an expression of almost disgust as she watches the guy across from her (a round dude with glasses perched on his nose and the sleeziest smirk she has ever seen on anyone almost ever) try to down three glasses of soju in a row. Yeah, Jungeun would be wearing that same expression if she had to go on a date with a guy like that.

As she approaches, she seems to draw Jinsoul's attention.

At first, the blonde seems to regard her with casual acknowledgement, just barely passing her eyes over her appearance before focussing once more on the guy who slams his shots down onto the table. Then her eyes snap back towards her as if she's just fully registered who it is that's approaching her table, and they widen impossibly wider and _is she wearing blue contacts?_ She opens her mouth to say something, but the guy from across her grabs at her hand that had been laying on the table and forces her attention back on him and _who takes their date to a bar?_

When Jungeun comes to stand beside their table, she looks down in displeasure at the guy's hand on Jinsoul's, who is trying to pull it back from his gammy grip.

She gathers his attention from merely _standing_ there and when she gets it, she almost regrets it. The way his perverse gaze drifts up her appearance and back down makes her want to take off her shoe and smack him round the face with it, see how he likes it when he gets his privacy violated, but she manages to control herself.

"Hi, what brings you-"

Jungeun holds up a finger. It silences him immediately.

Instead she turns to Jinsoul, who is gaping at her in disbelief. "Soul-ah, we have to go quick," her voice is dripping with theatrics and she doesn't think she's ever done such a bad job at lying. "Our pet fish, Call of Duty the Third, is dying and we're the only ones who can save him." Jungeun slides her hand down her free arm in search of her hand, and when she gets it she tugs her up. "Come with me quick, and we may be able to save him. His species - the cod - are in danger."

The guy tries to protest, moving to stand up, but Jungeun pretends to drunkenly stumble into him and coincidentally manages to knee him where it hurts. (As if Jungeun would ever lose her balance, even if she is drunk off her ass.) He immediately groans, hands flying to protect the area where he's been struck, and he collapses in his seat.

"It'll be alright, Soul, we'll save Call of Duty the First." Jungeun promises, tugging Jinsoul along and away from the still groaning guy. (She thinks she sees him blink away tears, but it may just be the slight daze that the alcohol brings.)

And that's the last she remembers of the night.

-

Jungeun regrets ever putting a single drop of soju near her mouth.

When she wakes up she's pretty sure she has the worst hangover she's ever experienced (honestly she'd thought that after drinking herself into oblivion when she'd met up with her highschool friends before going off to Seoul that she wouldn't repeat such event again, but here she is with a pounding headache). To say that she runs to the nearest bathroom is an understatement. If any of the other girls saw her, they'd think they just saw The Flash run past.

She empties out her insides into the toilet bowl, nearly missing in her haste but managing to hit the target. The last time she did this, she'd had Jiwoo at her back, rubbing her shoulder absently before shoving her away for a turn to empty out her round of soju. But now she was in a faraway city with no best friend to take care of her as she puked out her insides.

Heaving, she rests her forehead against the back of her fist. God, she couldn't get any sadder.

Maybe its in the middle of her trying to breathe herself back into sobriety, but someone has come into the bathroom in a surprisingly quiet manner. Quiet enough that she doesn't realize she isn't alone until her hair is being bunched up in delicate hands and being held back for her.

Jungeun has the urge to look up and check who it is (it may as well be a thief who had taken pity on her while they were on their way to steal what little there was in the dorm, because she doesn't think that any of her other roommates would really take the time out of their day to watch over their bitchy roommate) but she gets a surge of nausea and she's back to making friends with the toilet bowl. 

If she had the energy, her face would be red to the point of no return. Except she's pretty sure she's more white than anything.

_This is so embarrassing._

When her body thinks that she's had enough, her weight falls back on her heels and she's leaning weakly against the side of the bathtub, her head smacking it deftly just for good measures. (As if the headache griping at her brains isn't enough.)

Wearily, she squints through heavy eyelids and tries to make out who it is currently running a sponge under tap water in the dark of the early morning. And to say that she's surprised to find Heejin, the very first resident of the Moon Dorm, standing there in all her pink-pyjama-and-bunny-slippered glory looking like she's just fallen out of bed, is a severe understatement. Such an understatement that Jungeun is sure she could vault- no- step over it with ease that she'd never had while attending her gym classes in high school.

Quietly, Heejin approaches her once more and begins to wipe at her face (which suddenly feels incredibly stiff from her make-up and _god she hopes she doesn't get any bad spots_ ) and carefully at her mouth.

"Why..." It slips out of Jungeun's mouth before she has the mind to catch it, but her throat closes up from how dry it is and saves her the further embarrassment.

Except Heejin has heard her - and smelt her rancid breath, judging by the scrunch of the nose - and her features soften the slightest. "It's what good roommates should do." She says, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world and Jungeun has been missing this piece of information all along. "We should take care of each other when the other one is feeling sad." Her hands stutter when Jungeun's own features fold into a frown, but she braves on with a weak voice. "Or when one of us is feeling like they don't belong."

Everything stops turning for Junguen.

Like the microwave has run out of power, warm yellow light switching off and plate stopping abruptly.

She almost thinks that this is a conversation that's been dragged out by the product of her drunkness and insecurity, but the feeling of Heejin wiping at the edges of her eyes feels far too real to even be a dream.

And she doesn't know if Heejin knows it, but she's just spoken out her literal thoughts. As if someone had whispered in her ear exactly what she was thinking and to say that to her - to her face - just to... make her feel bad? Humiliate her? Rub it in her face?

Jungeun shrugs her off, pushing off from the cold tiles. "You don't have to do this for me." It's obvious that it's out of obligation more than anything else. "I can take care of myself."

Heejin doesn't make a sound in response, but she hears the toilet flushing and soft footsteps padding after her. It makes irritation crawl up her spine and prickle at the back of her neck because she doesn't need anyone's pity - especially not after she's just emptied her entire insides into the bathroom in the least gracious way possible (though she doesn't think that there is a possible gracious way to do so). She's been living in the dorm for more almost two months now and none of them have said a word of conversation to her, so she doesn't see why on earth it would start now. Of all times.

She goes to the kitchen, and fortunately Heejin has decided that she really is a waste of her time and has retreated back into their precious Room 1.

She's drinking her third glass of water when she hears someone approaching.

Ready to tell Heejin to back off and leave her alone again, Jungeun spins to the open doorway.

Only to find her blonde roommate, standing there in what appears to be her street clothes already. As if she's ready to leave at six in the morning despite it being a Sunday when all classes but hers and a small few are off.

Jungeun doesn't really know what to say to her (because Jinsoul hadn't been the one she'd been planning her whole conversation out for) so instead she does the next best thing and closes her mouth. It's worked so far at keeping whatever tension - animosity - there is between them at bay, and she doesn't really think it can fail her now.

She waits for Jinsoul to move into the kitchen and get whatever she needs, but the blonde continues to stand there. And it's not long before Jungeun thinks its starting to become creepy, seeing as the lights are off (heavens pray for the headache she'll experience once the sun comes up) and all she's doing is staring at her for several seconds before looking away again. It's starting to make her skin crawl uncomfortably, and she thinks that she can hold out this sudden silence contest they're having but when Jinsoul looks at her again (really, the puppy eyes do the opposite of what they're supposed to and make her want to hit the blonde instead) she just can't hold it in.

"Can I help you with anything?" And okay, she'd forgotten that Hangover!Jungeun tends to speak softer than her sober self. So the question comes out like she's trying to be nice when in reality the sarcasm should be pushing Jinsoul away by now.

Of course it makes Jinsoul come closer - _curse her croaky voice making her sound like she's vulnerable_ \- and she's wearing a soft smile before Jungeun can do anything about it. "Uhm... no, I was really hoping I could help you with something?" Her words are sluggish, like she's the one that's been drinking, and maybe it's because she's feeling particularly mean today but she notices that Jinsoul has a weird habit of speaking slow. "I- uh... I bought you something."

Jungeun's eyebrows try to shoot up into space.

From behind Jinsoul's back, she produces a familiar packaging.

She's standing in front of her now, slightly closer than arm's length (which makes Jungeun scurry further against the kitchen counter to try and put more distance between them), with the same sandwhich she gets herself when she has the money.

"I feel like the dumbest person on earth for eating your sandwich the other day," Jinsoul begins, and Jungeun gets a flashback to how she'd met the girl in the first place. "And I know this can come off the wrong way, and maybe it's because you don't eat at home, but you don't really have anything for breakfast, and then that made me think that maybe I really screwed up by eating yours that day and like, maybe you didn't get to eat for the rest of the day and that would have been my fault, and you were saved me from the worst blind date in history yesterday even though I did that and broke your bag and your computer-"

Curse Jungeun's weakness for dumb, rambly girls.

Her hand is resting on top of Jinsoul's before before she can stop herself, because it's long since been a habit of having to physically restrain Jiwoo whenever she goes off on one of her tangents. "Jinsoul."

(Jinsoul stops breathing again and this time Jungeun lets herself notice.)

"You don't owe me anything," Jungeun gently nudges the sandwich back towards Jinsoul in spite of the hungry clenching of her stomach. "We don't have to owe each other anything."

At that, Jinsoul's face scrunches up into an ugly expression before she's all but shoving the sandwich into Jungeun's hand. "But I want to ower you something." She's moving away before Jungeun can think to hand it back towards her, and she's shuffling to the fridge opposite. "I didn't really remember what sandwich flavor it was that you bought, so I bought all of them in case you were allergic to some of the ingredients, and I also didn't know what kind of drink you usually drink so I may have bought too many but..."

Jungeun stares with wide eyes at the multiple sandwiches and flavored milk bottles lined up inside, all with blue sticky notes pasted on them with what looks like her stage name messily scribbled onto them.

"Do you like raspberry?" Jinsoul asks in the tiniest voice, holding out the bottle in what seems to be a peace offering.

Instead of anything coherent, the only thing that comes out of Jungeun's mouth is an, "I..." and Jinsoul is all but shoving it into her now empty hand (the blonde taking the empty glass from there).

"You're an economics major, aren't you?" Jinsoul continues, her hair slightly frazzled now that she's standing closer and Jungeun can actually see. She jumps a little at that small fact being exposed of her, and the blonde is quick to notice because she scrambles to explain herself. "You- your textbooks! My brother studied economics and they're the same, so I kind of just assumed..."

Ah. Right.

"Anyway... I know econ have classes today because us engineering students do too, so I was wondering if maybe... we could go together?" Jungeun's brain is too fried to come up with an answer. "I'll lend you a bag, since I broke yours. I tried buying one this morning, but all of the stores were closed so..."

Jungeun blinks.

And blinks again.

And just for good measures she shakes her head a little.

"You tried buying... Jinsoul, it's six in the morning." Jungeun deadpans, looking however incredulous she looks right now. "At what time did you wake up?"

"Oh, uh..." The blonde manages to look almost guilty as she sheepishly looks away from her heavy stare, her cheeks dusted a slight pink as she does so. "I didn't?" Her voice rises as if she were confused of her answer. "I mean... we got home at two in the morning, and after we laid you down it was already three-ish... Heejin stayed up too! So I wasn't the only one, I swear."

She says that like it's any better.

"After that, I kinda just went out to get you some breakfast, since you're pretty hungover right now... I'm guessing?"

Jungeun definitely thinks she drank too far into oblivion and now she's in a parallel universe. Because this is the first proper conversation she's having with one of her roommates, and she's trying to tell her that some of the other girls - _Heejin -_ had stayed up all night to take care of her despite her bitchiness and bad moods. And yeah, Jungeun may be socially awkward and a tad bit hot headed, but she's not an absolute monster that she doesn't feel guilty for being such a dick to Heejin when she had been taking care of her earlier.

God, she's never wanted to jump off a bridge more in her life.

Jinsoul is still looking at her with the most hopeful expression, and maybe it's because of the guilt, or because of the sudden swell of relief at the fact that she gets to eat today, but she gives a defeated sigh and looks dutifully away from the pleading girl. "The bus leaves at seven."

And Jinsoul _beams_ \- she fucking _beams_ \- and Jungeun literally hides her face behind her new sandwich and raspberry milkshake because it's just too much for her frazzled brain.

"Cool!" The blonde hops in place, beginning to bounce backwards with too much energy for someone who just pulled an all-nighter. "I'll just- I'll be right back! You get ready and do your thing, I'll wait!"

Jungeun stares after the tiny storm that has just passed through the kitchen, and then at the sandwich.

(She crushes the small warm feeling in her chest.)

-

"Jinsoul where's your bag?"

"Don't worry, I can just carry my stuff."

"... Jinsoul is... is the bag you gave me _yours_?"

"You can use it until your new bag arrives, don't worry about it."

Jungeun thinks her eyes will pop out. "My _new bag_?"

Jinsoul gives her a reassuring grin. "Don't worry, Amazon delivery is really fast these days."

-

When she comes back from the cringe-induced memory that had struck her in the middle of the conversation with the girls at the Moon Dorm, Jungeun manages to shiver at the thought of her old self. Looking back now, the way her relationships have changed with the girls from Room 1 is almost monumental (Heejin grows a special, fond place in her heart; she and Hyunjin grow a dynamic she never thought she'd have with the girl she'd thought to be so closed-off; her and Haseul more often than not end up venting about their issues to one another whenever they need to; Yeojin remains a pain in her ass to this day, but Jungeun's response is to baby her as much as possible; and Vivi manages to baby her in response).

Being sat around their Christmas tree even though it's already a new year with all other eleven girls makes her heart swell significantly. (They'd all gone back to their homes to celebrate the holidays with their family, though they had agreed to celebrate it with this family too when they were all back at the dorm.) She feels a sense of happiness and warmth when she looks at all the brightly grinning faces.

Well, what would be brightly grinning faces, except they're all staring at her with envy and outrage as she holds the packaging in her hands.

"What the fuck?!" Jiwoo crawls over Sooyoung, who is sat right beside her, to get a better look inside her present.

"Language." Vivi has half the mind to scold her, though she herself looks pretty intruiged on what's inside.

"What?! That's what I wanted for Christmas but Haseul-unnie said it was too expensive!" Yeojin is wailing in despair as she stands in the center of their half-assed circle (now more of a scramble to see Jungeun's present).

"It is." Haseul insists vehemently to Yeojin, who turns to look at her with a daggered glare.

Jungeun stares wordlessly at the new phone glinting back at her. It's the latest model of its kind that was released just the week before, and it had been all the rave that everyone had been talking about. She'd just brushed it off as another thing that she'd never be able to buy (not that she needed a new phone, her half-dying, screen-cracked one was still working fine).

Yet here it sat. In her lap.

With blue wrapping paper torn to reveal the package.

"What the hell, Unnie?" Yerim desperately looks to the one responsible for all of this chaos. "Why can't you be _my_ sugar mommy?"

Jinsoul - dark hair tucked carelessly behind her ears and glasses perched on her nose to make her smug brown eyes a little bigger - only waggles her eyebrows at their younger shared roommate. "I'm not a millionaire, Yerim, I can't be a sugar mommy for _two_ pretty girls."

At that, Jungeun squints her eyes at the older girl. "Jinsoul, you are _not_ my sugar mommy."

"Uh! Your new three million won phone begs to differ!" Jiwoo is rampant, now scrambling across Sooyoung's lap to reach and snatch said phone out from her hands.

"And how come Lip-unnie doesn't call you 'unnie'?" Yerim points out, looking even more frustrated with the situation.

All of the younger girls pipe up, pitching in their complaints at the unfair favoritism (there is none, Jungeun swears quietly to herself, even though the only person who hears is Sooyoung and even she looks at her with disbelieving raised eyebrows) while Jinsoul stands admists their chaos, mischeviously grinning to herself.

Jungeun's cheeks are slightly warm (though they always are whenever she recieves a gift from the other girl, no matter how many times she's been given expensive products she could never buy on her own) and she hits the back of Hyunjin's head when she tries running away with the phone as she plucks it from Jiwoo's unsuspecting hands. When she meets Jinsoul's eyes over Chaewon's head, she expects those obnoxious winks the older girl always gives her.

She finds that the soft smile (fondness and glint in brown eyes) makes her more speechless than any random wink.

Jungeun just sticks her tongue out at her in return.


	4. unnie

"I never understood the Pokemon games," Vivi observes the younger girl from the chair that the latter had put beside the desk, her hands under her thighs as she peers forward in confusion. "What happens to the Pokemon after you capture them in that small ball? Do they starve if you don't take them out after a while?"

"Hm... I haven't taken out my Pidgey since I captured it, so I hope not." Hyejoo absently slides her mouse over her mouse pad that exhibits several female characters with the letters 'KDA' displayed across them. On her large computer screen is the display of the game that the girl has been recently grown obsessed with: the first version of the Pokemon game. After completing the most recent one in two weeks time and playing it over and over again (Vivi had seen her glued to her computer screen all month) the nostalgia had led to Hyejoo returning to the original. And she seems to be sharing it with her fanbase on stream. "'GetDisBread39' thank you for subscribing."

Vivi raises her eyebrows at the name, looking at the side of the screen where Hyejoo has her chat open. There are comments coming in at a respectable pace, considering that the younger girl only started streaming three months ago in the middle of her rebellion against Hyunjin and Yeojin. The two had had no faith in their roommate in terms of being able to have a successful job. (In all fairness, Hyejoo always manages to get herself fired after a week.)

Looks like Hyejoo's solution had been to freeload off her addiction to gaming.

A comment catches Vivi's eyes and she finds herself leaning forward to read it better. "'Exactly, where does a Pokemon as big as Wailord go?'" She reads it slowly so her pronunciation is clear and she manages to get the sentence out fluently. "Yeah! I'm not really familiar with all the names and things, but I know for sure it would be pretty claustrophobic if I was stuck in that little nightmare ball."

Hyejoo side-eyes her a little. "Unnie, you're a little weird for thinking about this so hard."

Resting her elbows on her knees, Vivi looks up to meet Hyejoo's judgemental squint of the eyes with her own scrunch of the nose. "Just like you have been thinking about our Princess?" She knows it's a low blow -- especially considering that they're on stream with two thousand of the girl's followers listening into their conversation -- but the opportunity to tease is too good to let up. All the girls know that beneath Vivi's perceptive and quiet personality, there's that playfulness that can keep up with Yeojin and Yerim on sugar. "I'd be careful with the names that you call me, Hye-ssi, you seem to forget the power I hold over you."

Betrayed, Hyejoo panickedly looks at the camera perched atop her computer monitor. "Suddenly I regret everything." She's talking to her subscribers, but Vivi sidles up next to her and makes an exaggerated pout at the camera, winking for good measure. "Which one of you losers was it that said to let the devil into my room? Someone ban them for me."

"Oh please, chat loves me." Vivi cups her own face and leans across Hyejoo's arms to rest her elbows on the desk, making eyes at what she knows is thousands of eyes watching from the safety of their own home.

Hyejoo easily nudges her aside with her shoulder, pushing her back into her chair as she establishes her position once more. "No they don't, they hate you and they want you to leave."

If it were anyone else, perhaps they would have taken the girl's snide comment seriously. But Vivi has been living in the dorm for three years now, and has known the younger girl for almost two of those three. So she is very much aware that despite it not showing so visibly, Hyejoo is spiritually blushing like a madman right now. And the knowledge has Vivi preening in her seat even as Hyejoo tries her best to push her away from her set up with her foot.

Laughing freely, Vivi grabs at her seat and shuffles closer than where Hyejoo had allowed her originally. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." She rests her cheek against Hyejoo's shoulder in a casual display of affection that she knows the younger girl is secretly leaning into. "No blackmail from now on, I swear."

Grumbling to herself, Hyejoo makes a show of trying to get the older girl off but eventually returns her concentration to her game. Which leaves Vivi quietly cuddling up to her side for thousands to see that the 'tough girl' persona that Hyejoo likes to play is a scam.

In the mean time, she can read some of the comments that have been flooding in at an alarming rate. Most of them being indistinguishable emotes that Vivi certainly does not know how to decipher. She is fully aware that the streaming community partakes in a foreign language she will never comprehend, mostly because she'd had some friends back in Hong Kong that had been familiar with the concept. But by picking out some that are actually written in hangul, she can see that the reason why chat is going crazy is because they think that she and Hyejoo make a cute pairing. That and there are several that are questioning what she meant by 'Princess', but she decides to let her tease disappear into the history of the Internet.

"Hyejoo-ya, chat thinks we're cute~" Vivi turns her head and puckers her lips at the younger girl, pretending to lean in for a kiss. She laughs when Hyejoo makes a stank face and angles her face as far away as her neck will allow her. "Why~ we could be the cutest couple on this site?" In a fortunately timed coincidence, Hyejoo accidentally clicks on a clip that one of her followers had linked in their donation message, taking her to a clip of some other streamers. It's a guy kissing his girlfriend's cheek repeatedly as the girl squeals outloud. "This could be us, but you playin'."

"Unnie, what the fuck?"

Gasping through her laughter, Vivi straightens to deadpan Hyejoo. "Mind your language, young lady, there might be little ones watching your stream right now."

"Please get out of my room." Hyejoo groans, sliding down her gaming chair. "This is literally worse than the time Jinsoul-unnie made a fool of herself on stream."

At the reminder, Vivi starts giggling again.

They had all heard about the incident of Jinsoul walking into Room Three while Hyejoo was streaming in her first couple of weeks. Everyone within the vicinity was very much aware of Jinsoul's embarrassing pajamas displayed for the nine hundred people that were watching at the time, as well as the ridiculous face mask she was wearing. Initially, Hyejoo had been absolutely livid at the older girl for coming into the room without knocking or giving warning, but after just a week of memes being sent in, Hyejoo had laughed hard at Jinsoul whenever she saw her. So much that Jinsoul now stays as far away as she can from Room Three even when she knows that Hyejoo isn't streaming. (Some of Hyejoo's loyal followers had found Jinsoul's Instagram and had proceeded to clown her on there, too, which was not cool from Vivi's perspective. Fortunately Hyejoo had the decency to tell them off in the comment's section as well as in her next stream.)

"Nothing can be worse than Jinsollie." Vivi says, watching several comments dictating ' _'little ones' uwuuuuuu_ ' fly upwards in chat. "Plus, if they don't meet your other roommates then they'll start thinking you live with crazy people."

Hyejoo scoffs loudly, for the first time fully diverting her attention from her game. "I _do_ live with crazy people." Her gaze is dead serious, though Vivi still grins in the face of it.

"Yeah, you're right." Leaning back in her chair, Vivi stares as a wild Pokemon appears on Hyejoo's screen. "The Room Three girls are fucking lunatics."

"What did you say about 'language' earlier?" Hyejoo glowers, elbowing at Vivi's knees violently.

"Aish!" Vivi jumps away from the girl while holding onto her knees for dear life. "You have really sharp elbows!"

"Better to stab you with." Hyejoo gives her a dark smile, which Vivi has to admit almost intimidates her with the way the eyeliner sharpens her eyes, if only it weren't for the baby that Vivi sees instead.

Pouting, Vivi rubs at what is probably going to become a bruise. "Who are you? The Big Bad Wolf?"

Hyejoo brings her hands up in a claw-like manner and pretends to growl at her. Going along with it, Vivi lets out an exaggerated squeal and brings her arms up to shield her face from the other girl. When she hears the giggle that she gets in response, she absolutely melts against the back of her seat and peeks through the gaps in her arms to where Hyejoo is laughing to herself. The way that the usually stoic girl's eyes become beaming crescents makes Vivi's heart warm like molten lava spreading across her chest. Her nose is scrunched so adorably that Vivi has to refrain from reaching over and pinching it. Vivi doesn't think that they've ever shared a moment this soft before.

Before they have the chance to read the comments telling them how cute they are, commotion from outside the refuge of Room Three manages to flow through the closed door.

Faintly, they can hear a girl shouting something along the lines of "you shouldn't be invading my privacy like this", followed by the hollow sound of a deeper, male voice returning an incorrigible retort. Vivi worriedly observes the door, inclined to leave her seat and go and see if Haseul is alright. But she reminds herself that this is something that the girl asked to have privacy for so instead she looks to Hyejoo as they exchange glances.

Vivi changes the subject. "You should use your pigeon, since you've had him trapped in that small ball since you kidnapped him." She tries to make her voice loud so that the incoherent screams in the background are muted by her voice while Hyejoo goes to turn up the music playing in the background.

"It's a 'Pidgey', Unnie, not a pigeon." Hyejoo sticks her tongue out at Vivi, who rolls her eyes and grooves to Hyejoo's surprisingly soft playlist. "But okay, I'll use him." Once more distracted by the battle at hand, Hyejoo begins to sing along to the song in a soft whisper that is audible to anyone in the room. Almost smitten, Vivi restrains herself from cooing at the younger girl who has apparently decided that she's going to make her spill all her 'uwus' today. (Yeojin had shown her way too many memes lately.) "Oh, it's a 'her'."

Intrigued, Vivi checks the screen to read the old Pokemon's name.

It's almost embarrassing just how loud she laughs when she registers it, but it's nothing she can help when it makes perfect sense. "You named it 'Heejin'?"

Hyejoo is smirking to herself as she decides what she's going to do first to defeat the wild Pokemon. "Duh, I think I did it after she tripped over nothing and fell into the river."

It had been a wild day. Some of the girls had decided to go out and get some fresh air after their exams (they had dragged Hyejoo, who had been clinging to her bed and screaming bloody murder like they were trying to actually kill her). They had been pleasantly walking through the park, making usual conversation about their days, when they crossed a flock of birds. Now, Vivi is very much aware about the fear that Heejin and Haseul harbored for the poor animals, but she had never seen either of them react to them in real life before. So when Heejin began to panic and back away, then stumbling over her own two clumsy feet and rolling into the small river, Vivi's first reaction had been to laugh. (She then helped the poor girl out of the water, trying to see if she was okay since she was sobbing so hard.)

"You're so mean," Vivi says, watching as Heejin the Pidgey barely makes a scratch on the wild Pokemon.

"I think Unnie deserves it after stealing my charger and proceeding to lose it." Chat is asking who Heejin is, but Hyejoo ignores them in favor of cursing at the Pidgey almost dying from one attack. "It's even weak like her! Oh my god, this is why we never let Heejin-unnie do anything around the house!"

Laughing to herself, Vivi watches for a couple more moments. She feels her chair shake as the sound of a door slamming is distantly heard through the music.

She begins to rise to her feet, busying herself with straightening out her hoodie. "Alright, thank you for letting me hide in here for a bit." She uses her finger to tickle the bottom of Hyejoo's chin, but the girl whines loudly and bats her hand away. Not allowing the younger girl to disgrace her like this in front of such a large audience, she reaches down and plants a firm kiss on the top of her head. She then scowls deeply, grabbing the girl fiercely by the jaw and shaking her face lightly. "Ugh, I'm going to have to get Chuu to wash your hair real nice later."

Hyejoo doesn't respond to her, but she does throw the nearby plushie at her back as she retreats out of the room.

The reason why she had been hiding in there in the first place was because Haseul's boyfriend suddenly showed up at their dorm. And judging by Haseul's reaction to his appearance at the door after hearing their rusty doorbell, she had certainly not asked him to show up.

There was a running rule stating that any boyfriends (or possible one-night-stands) were off-limits from the Moon Dorm. This was a rule that had already been established when Vivi had moved in, and apparently when Heejin and Hyunjin had moved in too. None of the girls seemed to have a problem with it, which had at first surprised Vivi since most of her friends back in Hong Kong had been so boy crazy. (In fact, now that she thought about it, it was weird that more of the girls aren't in relationships.) But the only one who seemed a little bothered had been Haseul, who's relationship with her boyfriend had been at a fresh six months.

Several years have passed, and from what she can hear over the phone calls that Haseul has and that one time Vivi had had to pick up the girl from a bar near the city center because she had been drunk and scared, she isn't so sure if they are still going as strong as they were back then. It isn't only because of the dorm rule that Vivi thinks this, because there have been plenty of times when her and Haseul have been out on their biweekly coffee date and have crossed Haseul's boyfriend on the street. Every time, Haseul always looks for an excuse for Vivi not to take them both up and have a nice conversation. And when Vivi actually manages to get her way, Haseul looks like it's the last place she wants to be. Which was strange at first, but when Vivi asks her about it and learns that it's because she wants to keep her dorm life separate from her life outside, she decides to give it up.

Having the boyfriend show up at the dorm unannounced (admittedly with a romantic bouquet of flowers) obviously sent Haseul into a spiral. 

When Vivi had met Haseul's gaze as he had charged on through and into their messy living room (much to Jungeun's chagrin that very morning) she knew that she was not wanted anywhere near what was about to become a catastrophe. So she had disappeared into Hyejoo's room, as she was the only other girl who was still at home at that time of the day.

"Trouble in paradise?" Vivi tries to break the tense silence.

Haseul stands in front of the door, her shoulders coiled and tense. Vivi is at arms length when she finally turns around, tears lining her angry eyes and the most tense expression ever. "He's such a douche!"

The faint smile on Vivi's face vanishes as she carefully steps closer with her arms outstretched. Vivi watches tentatively as Haseul tries to regain her footing after the small misstep, knowing that if the girl wants to then she'll be the one to come to her first. She bide's her time for Haseul to shuffle her cute slippers on the floorboards and into her embrace to actually hug her. She gathers her up -- wrapping her loose limbs up from where they were hanging limply at her sides -- and makes sure that every part of their bodies are pressed comfortably. With Haseul's hands resting against her chest, where her calm heartbeat provides a guide for the other, Vivi begins to shift her weight on each leg.

"What did he do this time?" She says it with as much neutrality as she can, though it's difficult to keep the contempt from her voice when this has become a recurring theme in their friendship.

She can't say that she's tired of being Haseul's emotional support throughout everything, because that's what they've both been to each other for so long, but seeing her be hurt over and over isn't something that Vivi derives happiness from. The girls don't really get to know much about Haseul's relationship other than sometimes their roommate will be gone on a date and come back at a reasonable time. Though Yeojin evidently doesn't really agree with her sister's relationship.

(Neither does Vivi, but she's not in a position to say anything about that.)

"He showed up!" Haseul shouts, but she doesn't pull away from the hug. Instead she just frustratedly hops in place and wraps her fingers around the front of Vivi's shirt. "He always wants to come back to the dorm and do whatever, but I've told him so many times that it's against the rules -- I even sent him a picture of the rules on his phone! But he's always insisting and trying to push me to do things that I _don't want to do_ and it just makes me feel like shit all the time." She's quiet for a while, breathing heavy puffs of anger against Vivi's ear while the latter tries to physically squeeze out all of the negativity she's feeling. It seems to be working when Haseul wriggles in her tight hold and snakes her arms around her waist, clasping them together in a tight hold.

It's times like these where Vivi finds herself drifting to a place she isn't familiar with.

She's content to stay there and keep hugging Haseul until one of the other girls comes home and asks them what they're doing. (It's a Tuesday, so the first girl to come home is usually Yerim, who returns from her morning philosophy classes at the university.) And it's not like Vivi doesn't usually show physical affection, because she does -- the girls all know just how much she loves to coddle them when she gets the chance -- but it's just... different.

It feels good.

"He left his fucking flowers, too!"

At Haseul's outburst, Vivi lets out a small sigh and loosens their hug.

She turns in the small girl's arms and looks to where the incriminating flowers are discarded. Irritation is bubbling inside of Vivi, but she hides it with a dark smile when she pulls back to look at her best friend in the face. A curiously evil thought crosses her mind, and before she can stop herself she's saying: "Let's burn them?"

At the suggestion, a scandalized look crosses Haseul's face. "B-burn..." She's then stepping out of Vivi's grip and shaking her head. "We can't just- can we just burn them? It'll set off the fire alarm! We can't have the dorm almost burn down again!"

Vivi rolls her eyes, but she's already moving her way towards the coffee table where her study notes and laptop had been piled up. She's snatching the bouquet of roses up from the top of her laptop (she's a little annoyed to see that some water droplets have slid off the petals and onto the device, but she'll deal with that later) and she's walking over to Room Three. She ignores the little yaps of Haseul's protests (as cute as they are) and pushes her head through the door.

Hyejoo spins around with her nerf gun armed and ready in her hand, about to aim directly at her face. She looks like she's ready to kill her for interrupting her conversation with her stream.

Ignoring the threat, Vivi nudges further into the room.

"Yo, Hyejoo, wanna go burn stuff?" Vivi is smiling, but it feels tight on her face. Usually the thought of burning something will make her feel a little excited, but with the stems of the flowers digging into the palm of her hand and the thought of Haseul's boyfriend, she finds it a little difficult to find that same excitement. "It'll be fun, I promise."

Hyejoo ponders for several moments, her fingers playing with the plastic toy in her hands.

Her eyes wander the empty room, missing of its usually chaotic inhabitants.

Then she's disarming her nerf gun and placing it on the desk with a loud clatter. Turning to her camera, she announces, "this is today's stream for today. I hope you losers rot in hell, while I go commit arson in the back alley with my Unnies." She's pushing back from her chair and trying to disconnect the stream as she rushes. Spinning on her heel, Hyejoo snatches her hoodie from the back of her chair and storms over to her. "Let's go fuck this shit up."

-

Vivi grabs the handles of the bike as firmly as she can while Yeojin hops around in front of her. "Be careful, I've never done this before," she says as the small girl meets her gaze with an intimidating amount of exuberance.

"Just keep the bike up, Unnie." Yeojin's reassurance isn't very... reassuring, but Vivi plants her feet heavily on the concrete of the little patio outside of their dorm and levels the handles in front of her with a determined gaze. She can't promise much, but she'll do her best not to drop the girl.

Beside them, a loud shriek resembling that of a pterodactyl cuts through the empty streets followed by the stressed shouting of their resident cat-lady. "Fuck! Do you really have to scream right in my _ear_?!" Hyunjin is doing her best to stabilize Jungeun's bike from where she sits, face mask shielding prying eyes from her likely panicked expression. The two are screaming insults at one another, as is often heard whenever the two are in conversation, though Yeojin and Vivi barely bat an eye at the exchanges. At the handles sits Jungeun, who tries to lean back to rest against Hyunjin's front in the intended position, but is gripping onto the back of the younger girl's hands too hard. "Get your ugly claws off of me! You're going to make me bleed!"

Yeojin cackles as Jungeun shouts obscenities back at her, distractedly moving to where Vivi is still waiting. "Come on, we can do that too." She says, spinning around and holding onto the middle of the handle bars with her small hands.

Vivi's heart attempts to fly out of her mouth when she almost drops the whole bike as Yeojin leaps to sit on the handle bars. The last thing she wants to do is accidentally kill their youngest resident (as annoying as she can be with her loud voice and need to play bad TikToks when she's trying to sleep because she lost her headphones).

She's pretty sure that Haseul, as much as she scolds and reprimands, would positively _murder_ her for sending her little sister to the hospital. Last time that had happened was when Yeojin, Hyejoo, Hyunjin and Yerim had been trying to master the skills of 'parkour' and had attempted to jump out of the window and into the street. The three older girls had successfully pulled it off, but Yeojin unceremoniously splattering against the concrete (admittedly screaming _"FOR SPARTA!"_ ) had been an image that Vivi hadn't been able to get out of her brain. Even to this day, everyone in the dorm does their best to keep Yeojin away from any open windows. When Haseul had arrived at the hospital (strands of hair wildly sticking out of place and foaming at the mouth) she brought down her wrath on the three girls for their irresponsibility, including Vivi just because she had been present and guilty by association. Yerim had been reduced to tears and even Hyejoo had the mind to look guilty.

"We're doing it!" Yeojin cries, arms shooting into the air in victory as Vivi manages to balance the both of them with what little coordination her body allows her. "Onward, my steed! We have a dragon to catch by midnight!"

Not even grimacing at the volume, Vivi accommodates the younger girl against her chest comfortably. "Hold on, I don't want you falling on our way there."

It's easier for her to kick off and start cycling, because Yeojin is both tiny and light. It's almost like cycling with her bag in the front basket that they had taken off before trying this whole thing. She would not have noticed she was holding a child if it weren't for the head resting comfortably against hers and the stream of words endlessly falling from an excited mouth. Something about always doing this with her friends to get back to the dorm...

Behind them, however, Hyunjin struggles to not swerve the bike every-which-way with a tense Jungeun as her cargo. "Unnie, I thought you said that the person being carried had to loosen up!"

"How can I do that when the person carrying me is a goddamned psycho?" Jungeun's face is red from anxiety.

It's common knowledge among the girls in the Moon Dorm that in spite of her icy demeanor and nonchalant, 'don't give a fuck' aura, Jungeun is incredibly easily to make blush. Initially, Vivi had thought that perhaps the girl was just continuously feeling sick or unwell so she always went out of her way to prepare some herbal tea or try to give her medicine to make her feel better. But after observing her quietly after numerous rejections, she realized that it was just something that Jungeun's face did. Even if it was as simple as someone sincerely saying 'thank you' to her, or her getting annoyed at them for not picking up their dirty laundry from the floor, the girl's face would always tinge some shade of red.

From where Yeojin comfortably rests against her, she starts to sing Red Velvet's Psycho. Her voice emanates from her chest as she laughs in between the lyrics, but she sounds buoyant and more lively than she has been these past couple of weeks. So instead of shying away from the loud volume ringing in her ear, she nuzzles her face against the side of the smaller girl's and playfully kisses the hair behind her ear. It sends Yeojin jolting and pretending like she doesn't aboslutely adore the sign of affection, but Vivi doesn't mind.

They're on grocery duty, which Yeojin seems to be really excited to be doing for once. Usually, whenever the girls will tell her to do something around the dorm, she'll get prickly and annoyed. It's a change of pace to have her willingly dash out of Room One to join Vivi on her trip.

The two bickering girls behind them begin to quiet down, Hyunjin having found a steady pace that doesn't threaten Junguen's entire existence and Jungeun taking her long, manicured nails out from where they had been digging into Hyunjin's skin. Instead Hyunjin joins in with Yeojin's singing, pedaling faster in order to catch up to them and try to harmonize with the younger girl.

That's another thing that manages to soften Vivi up: Hyunjin has been awfully cooperative these past several days, especially since she's been letting Yeojin cling to her side in a way that would have normally made her snap. It's not that Hyunjin dislikes Yeojin -- at least that's what she had said when her, Vivi, Chaewon and Jiwoo had been talking -- but more of a contrast in personalities that makes it difficult to get along. And Vivi can see exactly what she's talking about, because even if she's one of the more detached residents of the dorm, she can say that her other competitor is easily Hyunjin. (Aside from Sooyoung, but she's a special case.) Hyunjin often tends to enjoy her own presence over a group's and likes to scurry into whichever nook and cranny shields her away from the rest of the world. In contrast, Yeojin loves to interact with people and will not shy away from making conversation with whoever is nearest and willing to listen (she'll talk even if they're unwilling).

So seeing them together these days is a breath of fresh air. Especially when Vivi and Haseul had found the two cuddled up in Yeojin's bed in Room Two.

For some strange reason, she feels accomplished watching Hyunjin coming out of her personal bubble. Like pride, or something.

Vivi basks in the soft winds pushing her bangs back to reveal her forehead, enjoying the fresh air after being cooped up for so long in Room One trying to study for the exam she has tomorrow.

Normally, she'll take whatever chance she has to go outside and do some exercise, having signed up for a membership in their local gym just to keep her body in shape. None of the other girls seem to have the same motivation that she has to work out, and the ones that do have different schedules to her (Hyunjin and Jungeun always share dance lessons in the afternoons with classes in the mornings, and Sooyoung was always disappearing and appearing from their dorm at will) but it doesn't stop Vivi from going about her routine at her pace. In fact, she enjoys the moments of solitude after being in an enclosed space with so many girls.

"So how come you and Hyun have bikes now?" Vivi asks Jungeun, who has visibly relaxed against Hyunjin's larger frame. (She looks like a small, angry baby with that absentminded frown on her face.) "I thought you guys took the bus to get to dance?"

She'd heard more times than not how Jungeun would scream at Hyunjin from elsewhere in the dorm that they were going to miss their bus.

Before Jungeun can even answer, Hyunjin cuts her (impressively stable) singing and shoots Vivi a knowing glance. "Because Mark-oppa cycles a lot and told Jungeun-unnie that it's better for the environment if we cycle everywhere." There's familiar mischief on Hyunjin's face that calls for trouble. "So obviously Jungeun-unnie had us buy bikes."

Said girl aggressively bumps their heads together, the blush on her face unclear whether it's from annoyance or 'other reasons'. "Why do you always try to suggest that I like him?" Jungeun huffs and brushes hair from her face from where the wind has blown it across her face. "All of our dance team has bikes now, it's not just us."

"But you guys are broke -- how'd you get 'em?" Yeojin chuckles. Vivi can hear the smirk in her voice, dripping with roguishness as she shines a light on the girls' financial situation.

As if sharing the same thought, Jungeun reflexively moves to cover Hyunjin's mouth with her free hand while Hyunjin tries to move her head away from the offending limb. They're speaking over one another in messy words that Vivi suddenly can't hear over the sound of moving traffic from the oncoming road ahead of them, but she sees how Hyunjin dangerously swerves off balance before regaining herself. Jungeun shrieks loudly again and brings her hands down to the handle bar to steady herself. Her eyes are bulging out of their sockets in her panic and her head is pressing insistingly against Hyunjin's so that the latter has to push back or they'll both fall sideways. In spite of everything, Vivi laughs at the action, joining in on Yeojin's raucous mockery while the two dance partners fight over who has control over their bike.

It's easy for Vivi to angle her and Yeojin so that they turn the corner, but Hyunjin seems to have more trouble with it with a restless Jungeun still doing her best to silence her.

Once they've safely completed the obstacle of turning the corner and Hyunjin catches up to them again, she shouts, "Jinsoul-unnie got her the bike as a present for her!" Jungeun's protests saying otherwise, but none of it can be heard as a large delivery truck rushes past them at full speed. "She said that it was a 'late birthday present' but we all know that she got her those pair of earrings for her birthday."

"Shut up, Hyunjin!"

Vivi raises her eyebrows and sends a glance to the two girls.

Sure enough, Jungeun's ears are nicely decorated with the same earrings that Jinsoul had gifted to her for her birthday a while ago. It had easily outranked all other attempts at a gift that the rest of the girls had brought, what with their battered wallets and Jungeun insisting that she really didn't need anything expensive. Aside from Jiwoo's gift, which had been tickets to their favorite artist's concert. The girl had looked ready to pass out when Jinsoul was presenting her gift, scared out of her mind that it would perhaps beat hers since _"Jungeun is my best friend and I should have the best present!"_ Especially after what had happened the year prior to that, when Jinsoul had spoiled the birthday-girl rotten and had left all the other girls nervously holding their gifts in their laps. After that had happened, there was an unspoken rule that Jinsoul would always go last whenever gift-giving and Jungeun were involved.

Because suspiciously, Jinsoul only spends large sums of money whenever it's Jungeun receiving the gift. (Not to say that Vivi didn't enjoy the much-needed gift card to the spa and the beautifully written letters for her own birthday, but it wasn't anything compared to a whole bike, or the hottest phone on the market, or that laptop that Jinsoul had bought two years ago.)

They arrive at the store by the time the sky has darkened considerably, artificial light flooding from the glass doors.

Yeojin hops off the handle bars with ease, and skips a couple of steps further in her excitement. Her hands are extended outward at her hips like she's a little penguin waddling her way forward, and Vivi watches her with precaution as she does so. "We're here, peasants!"

Dismounting Hyunjin's bike, Vivi playfully scowls at the small girl. "What is up with you and talking like you're in the Joseon era all of a sudden?"

"She's been watching a historical drama, lately." Hyunjin provides an answer as she approaches the bike racks with Jungeun's bike. She's pulling a black security chain from the bag hanging casually from her shoulders with practiced ease, and Vivi admires her a little for the fluid movements that she executes as she does so. "It's pretty damn _annoying_ to listen to when _I'm trying to sleep,_ " she says in the direction where Yeojin is bouncing over to the store entrance, not paying mind to the conversation.

Vivi laughs softly to herself as she lets Hyunjin take the bike from her. "Have you been having trouble sleeping?" She watches as Hyunjin concentrates on wrapping the second security chain (this time red) around the bike. "I can hear you tossing and turning above my bed all the time. And you usually knock out easily."

There's something that washes over Hyunjin's expression as she mulls over her words. She's already finished locking the bikes up, but she's tugging at it to see if it's safe. Maybe she's tugged at it too many times for it to be normal, but Vivi isn't about to start questioning why she looks like she wants to tear the chain apart. "It's not my fault that the mattresses at the dorm suck ass..." With one last, firm tug, Hyunjin straightens in her place and pushes her loose hair back. Yerim had done a messy plait down her back that morning (she had done so to all of the girls that had gathered in Room Two for that specific event, but Vivi's had fallen out throughout the day) and the hairs that had escaped the hairband were framing her face. "I just can't sleep in general, but don't worry about it though."

Vivi squints her eyes a little but decides not to say anything about it.

She knows for a fact that one thing she cannot do is try to approach one of Hyunjin's problems head-on. She's tried it in the past when they'd had a disagreement about sleeping arrangements and Vivi had just wanted to get the confrontation over and done with. Obviously she hadn't known that Hyunjin would scatter away from her every time they crossed paths like a scared cat and avoid her for almost two weeks. So no, she isn't about to bombard her with questions about what's wrong.

Instead, she sidles up beside her and hooks their arms together.

Hyunjin, despite her closed off personality, is open to physical affection, which Vivi will take advantage of whenever they manage to cross paths at the dorm. So she welcomes the touch by tugging her closer against her side as they stride into the grocery store, looking for Yeojin's chaotic direction of travel and Jungeun's lethargic stumbling.

"I haven't been getting much sleep either," Vivi says, glancing around the vegetables that welcome customers when they first walk in. She'll be needing some of these for when she wants to cook her lunch tomorrow. "I've been having weird dreams lately, about some weird aliens coming to take me back to their planet to conduct experiments on me."

"Oh, you should probably get that checked out." Hyunjin is serious as she replies, taking the batch of spring onions she has pulled from the pile and replacing them with what the girl probably thinks is a better one. "I used to have dreams about aliens and that caused me to lose my hair."

Sparing a glance to see if she's actually serious, Vivi observes the stoic expression on the younger's face. "You went bald?"

"Hmm... nah, my scalp is amazing." They walk towards where Yeojin is crouching in front of a fridge, her hands cradling her phone as she stares intently at the contents.

"Well what about you? Any alien dreams for yourself?" Vivi walks past Yeojin and drops the spring onions in the basket beside her, though Hyunjin purposefully bumps her with her leg as they stride through and tips the small girl off-balance. Her face scrunches up in delight when she hears a string of curses behind her, though her eyebags are becoming more prominent the more that Vivi looks at her. "Do you think we need more milk?"

They stop in front of the dairy section as Vivi scans the prices for the milk that she usually buys and sees that the price has gone up slightly. Hyunjin hugs her arms with both of her hands and cuddles up to her in the cold. "Yeah, I think Chaewon finished it when she made that monstrosity yesterday." She says, shivering either from the low temperatures of the refrigerated section or from the memory of the Princess' poor attempt at baking. "And no, I haven't really been dreaming lately. At least I don't think I have."

There's a small frown that forms on Hyunjin's face, her brow furrowing pensively while Vivi leans forward and pulls a carton of milk out. "Really? No extraterrestrial beings that try to steal your bread all the time?" She asks playfully, though she can tell that she's getting Hyunjin to warm up to the thought of opening up.

"Your Korean is really good, Unnie." Hyunjin says off-handedly as she squeezes her bicep. Together they weave through the grocery store in search for more ingredients. "And no, it's more of some of the guys appearing in my dreams and having weird conversations with me."

"The girls appear in your dreams?" Curiously, Vivi looks up at Hyunjin as they let an old couple past in the tight space of the store. Hyunjin looks uncomfortable in her skin, like she is unsureabout whether she can talk about this or not. "As if we don't get enough of them with having to live with them, now they're chasing you in your dreams, huh?" She laughs, trying to distract the younger girl from thoughts that could get her to close herself off again.

"Yeah..."

That's not very convincing.

"Unnie! We need meat right? We totally need meat." Jungeun drags her feet over to them with a basket full of nothing but pork and chicken. Her oversized hoodie is engulfing her almost entirely and her messy hair makes her look like she's just rolled out of bed. If Vivi hadn't lived with her for so long, she would have thought that she was one of those bad influences that she should stay away from. It reminds her of the first impression that she'd had of the girl when they met all those years ago. "It's been so long since we got to eat homemade meat, so I think we should have a large dinner to celebrate our friendships. What do you think? It's great? Great, thanks for your input, Unnie."

As if a storm has just rolled by, Vivi and Hyunjin watch as Jungeun disappears down the snack isle.

"Ya, you better be pulling out Jinsoullie's credit card because I'm not paying for that!" Vivi calls after her, and even though they can't see her they can hear something tumbling off one of the rows and onto the floor in response. Laughing to herself, Vivi pulls a distracted Hyunjin further into the store. "So you were saying about your dreams?"

In the mean time, Vivi tries to recount just how much money she has left on her card to now just how much she's buying for tomorrow as well as how much Jungeun had given her in cash to buy for all of the girls. (Jungeun was the only one in the dorm who was taking economics as a course, so it made sense that all of the financial matters pass through her first. Plus, none of the other girls trusted Jinsoul with their money despite her own financial stability, nor Haseul who always seemed to be losing things around the dorm. Sooyoung wasn't even an option, considering how busy she always seemed.) They would have enough to last them throughout the week, it seemed, which was just enough until it was Jiwoo and Hyejoo's turn to go grocery shopping.

She hasn't really noticed that Hyunjin hasn't said anything until she's finished collecting everything she needs from that isle and sees that Hyunjin looks strangely pensive.

Impulsively, Vivi gently pries herself away from her and angles her body towards her. "Are they bothering you a lot?" She tries to keep her voice nonchalant, though they can both hear the worry seeping through. "Do you want me to make you some chamomile tea?"

"I don't know..." Hyunjin avoids her eyes by taking some of the products from her arms casually and turning to head back the way that they came from. "It's just trouble sleeping, I'm sure I'll be fine."

Worriedly, Vivi follows after the girl. "I mean, what do you normally do when you have trouble sleeping? Doesn't Heejin let you sleep in her bed?"

Now that she thinks about it, it's been a while since she's seen Hyunjin occupying almost the entire expanse of Heejin's bed. For a while she had thought that it was Hyunjin's bed just from how much she resided in it, and from the way she seemed to mark her territory with stray pieces of clothing strewn lazily on the surface or the odd cat plushies here and there. In fact, there had been a long period of time where Hyunjin hadn't even touched her bed from how often she fell asleep cuddled up next to Heejin (who despite how much she likes to complain, actually loves the attention from the other girl) and Vivi had forgotten that she even had a bunk mate. Except now, that doesn't seem to be happening much.

And this is something that Hyunjin seems to be aware of because her shoulders tense under the loose black shirt she's wearing, and suddenly she's turning a sharp corner down the seaweed isle.

Taking the hint, Vivi lets her jaw drop a little before regaigning her compusure. "Hyunjin, did you two have a fight?"

At the mention of the word 'fight', Hyunjin's panicked pace begins to slow down until she's standing amidst the different varieties of seaweed pleading to be picked up from the shelves. "It's her fault," she says as she turns slightly, her expression hidden slightly by her face mask. "She doesn't care about me or our friendship so I'm just respecting her decision."

Vivi frowns and tries approaching Hyunjin, who just ambles backwards a little to maintain a safe personal bubble around herself. She remembers how the younger girl doesn't enjoy to be physically comforted whenever she's feeling down and stays rooted in place instead, hugging the products in her arms instead. "Did she really say that? Heejin doesn't seem like the kind of person to say something like that -- especially not to you, Hyunjin. You two are like best friends -- you've been there for each other for so long."

If Hyunjin weren't wearing her mask, Vivi thinks she'd be pouting right now. In fact, she has the vague idea that that's exactly what the younger girl is doing.

"Yeah well, she obviously doesn't seem to think so." The way she speaks is as if it's decided, and before Vivi can even think to try and open her mind up to an alternative Yeojin is sprinting down the isle like the devil is at her heels with her basket swinging precariously in her hands.

"Wah! Help Unnie!" She's so loud and chaotic that Vivi winces more at the thought of getting kicked out of the store rather than at the volume. Behind her is Jungeun, who's cheeks are tinted that familiar pink and is tearing down the isle with fury coating her features. Vivi doesn't even want to begin to think about why exactly the two girls think it's a good idea to start a game of tag in the middle of their local grocery store, because she's sure that if she gives it too much thought then a headache will start to form and she's ran out of her clove tea to even try and soothe the migraine.

Besides, Hyunjin already looks like she's decided that she doesn't want to have this conversation with her and has instead taken to restraining Yeojin in her attempt at an escape.

Sighing heavily to herself, Vivi decides to drop the topic and instead tries to pry Jungeun from her poking attack on their youngest roommate before they get banned forever.

-

The girls will be as chaotic as they can be, but Vivi will still not swap her residence at the Moon Dorm for anything in the world.

Even when it's almost fifteen minutes past midnight and Jinsoul is completing her engineering model at their dining table, plastic goggles on to shield her drowsy eyes from any flying splinters, and Hyejoo is sat in front of the TV screen with a blanket shrouding her entire body as she intently stares at the horror game plaing out, and Chaewon is...

Vivi doesn't know why Chaewon has decided that doing sit ups in the middle of the night in their living room is a good idea, but it's not like she's her mother and can tell her to go to sleep when there are other girls who are also staying up late.

"Hyejoo..." The blonde is grimacing as she tries to get said girl's attention. "...are you counting me..." There's slight desperation in her voice, most likely due to her stomach beginning to cramp right around her sixtieth sit up. (After the first couple, Hyejoo had obviously given up on her assigned task in favor of concentrating on her game so Vivi had been silently counting for her instead.) "...Hyejoo-yaaaa~" Chaewon whines when Hyejoo barely spares her a glance, beads of sweat building up on her forehead. "C-count out loud..."

Exasperation tinging her voice, Hyejoo lolls her head in the blonde's direction. "One-hundred and eighty-two, one-hundred and eighty-three-"

"You!" Chaewon immediately stops on 'sixty-four' and launches herself at Hyejoo with what remaining strength she has left, swatting at her torso with her arms and pushing her to the floor in her fit of frustration. "I thought you said you would count for me! You lied!"

It's amusing to watch as Hyejoo let's herself be beaten by the smaller girl for a little while, everyone present in the room fully knowing that Hyejoo could take any two of the girls on at once and still win over them. (Except Vivi is pretty sure Jinsoul is a little delirious right now as she tries to put two screwdrivers together, so she doesn't count.) It's even more amusing for Vivi, who is aware of the small fondness that Hyejoo harbors for Chaewon, to see the exact moment Hyejoo decides to strike back and bind the girl's wrists together with one of her hands as the other is preoccupied with the console remote. Even with her advantageous strength, Hyejoo is mindful of Chaewon's physical capabilities and doesn't completely demolish her while she still has the chance. Instead, she seems to wrap her arm around her and tugs her against her body, swallowing her into the fortress of blankets and pillows against the couch.

A concoction of emotions swarm inside Vivi as she watches the exchange from her place in the armchair.

She feels warmth and fondness for the two girls who had originally struggled to find a place in their dorm. Being some of the last girls to join them, it had taken longer for them to fit into their strange and intricate dynamics, often feeling as if they were strangers to them all. But after some encouraging from the more extroverted girls of the dorm (a.k.a Jiwoo, Yerim and Yeojin), they had begun to open themselves up a bit more. And even though Vivi enjoyed watching from a relatively safe distance, she can certainly say that she's proud to see some of the shyest girls be so comfortable in their home.

Yet at the same time, watching the interaction between the two close girls makes something stir up inside of Vivi's chest.

Her papers and laptop are forgotten on her lap as she watches Chaewon discretely melt into Hyejoo's frame, as if not wanting to make it obvious that that had been both of their intentions from the very beginning. There's an open and content expression that doesn't show itself with anyone else on the blonde's face, and Vivi watches quietly as Hyejoo returns the attention almost minimally. Her hand that had been restraining Chaewon's wrists is draped over the latter's shoulders and the other comes up to meet it so that she can hold the controller with both hands instead of one. She accomodates the extra presence as if it were second nature, and it shines a flashlight into something that Vivi hadn't really been aware of about herself.

There's a hint of loneliness sitting in her chest.

Which doesn't make sense to Vivi, because she's in an overcrowded dorm with eleven other over-exciteable girls and _god_ does she struggle to find a moment of peace.

But it's there, and it sends shivers down to her very fingertips and toes.

It almost brings tears to her eyes the more she focusses on it.

She laughs at herself quietly at her unexpected reaction, hands curling around her sweater paws to rub at her wet eyes tiredly. It must be her time of the month soon, because she seems to be getting emotional over nothing when there's no reason for her to. That or she's sleep deprived and she's reacting like a toddler who missed their bed time. (Or Jungeun if they keep her up past ten.)

Vivi feels the presence before she hears or sees it, but she's not really surprised when warm arms snake around her neck from the side and a head is burying itself into the side of her head.

The familiar scent of sweet smelling shampoo and whatever hair mask that Haseul had decided to use fills her nostrils, and she finds that her heartbeat (when had it even decided to speed up?) begins to slow down at the stimulus. Just having the pressure resting comfortably on her shoulders and a familiar weight settling itself into her side makes her feel all the better. It's as if whatever emotional downpour had decided to come down on her has been washed away and cleansed by this particular presence at once, despite how unexpected it was.

Reticent, Vivi wraps her arm around the thin waist to tug Haseul closer so they can share in each other's warmth. It's familiar when she nuzzles her face into the short hair, just as she always does with the other girls whenever they cuddle.

Except there's a swooping feeling in her gut.

"When are you coming to bed?" is mumbled somewhere into the side of her skull, the faint feeling of lips moving registering against her scalp.

Something warm fills Vivi up from her toes and right up to her fingertips, and then she's pushing her papers and laptop onto the small table beside the armchair so that she can pull Haseul into her lap fully. "I need to finish my report," she feels Haseul tightening her grip around her shoulders and immediately amends, "but I can do it tomorrow."

Haseul has always looked out for her, ever since day one, and Vivi will forever be grateful to her. She had been everything ranging from her impromptu Korean teacher to her home-away mom, reminding her to eat dinner whenver she'd be too engrossed in her studies or to drink some water if she'd been stuck at her desk for too long. Even if Haseul has to split her time between school, Yeojin, and her boyfriend, the girl always makes sure that she makes time for Vivi in her busy schedule. She's forgetful, but she never really forgets to include her in her day.

"Hey, I love you." Vivi says when she feels Haseul sink further into her.

"Hmm..." Haseul takes a while to move from the safety in Vivi's hair, but when she leans back and meets her eyes with her almost shut eyelids, there's a soft smile on her face. "Mmai love you too."

It's mumbled, so Vivi knows Haseul is tired out of her mind, but it still makes her heart tickle all happily at the response. "Come on, let's go to bed now."

They move together, Vivi making sure that all of her things are safely perched on the small table so that they can't fall off. Haseul waits patiently for her, hands stretching out the shirt that she's wearing as a yawn takes over her. Vivi says goodnight to the two girls playing videogames, touching the tops of their heads affectionately before turning to the dining table to do the same to Jinsoul. She finds that the engineering student is passed out against her hand, which holds her miniature screwdriver, and is almost drooling as her cheek stretches out abnormally.

Chuckling slightly to herself, Vivi makes sure to nudge Jinsoul awake and tell her to head to bed before moving to her own room.

Haseul is already collapsing into Vivi's bed when Vivi closes the door quietly behind her.

In the dark, she can make out two bodies curled together in Heejin's bed. She knows that from the restless tossing and turning in the bunk above her own bed that it's probably one of the other girls who decided to cuddle with Heejin for the night (the likely culprit is Jiwoo, who seems to crave physical affection, but she wouldn't be too surprised if she wakes up to Yerim's face too).

When Vivi lets herself collapse beside Haseul, she feels her tense body try to morph itself with the mattress. She's so exhausted that her eyes immediately close and she's already teertering into unconsciousness without even doing anything. In fact, she barely feels the covers being pulled over her body and a warm body gravitating towards hers. She hadn't known that she was _this_ tired until she actually laid down, though this seems to be a reoccurring theme throughout her time at university.

She feels soft lips being pressed to the side of her jaw, followed by the softest sigh against her skin.

It's safe to say that she sleeps well that night.


	5. the cost of liberty

**[tw]: homophobic comments**

**-**

Dance.

Yerim can feel her heart flutter when the word crosses her mind. She can feel her insides leaping with glee at the thought of moving her body to the thrums of music. Her muscles twitch beneath her skin almost too eagerly and her fingers and feet defy her very mindpower to follow the flows of the song. There’s never a moment where she allows herself to feel so free if it isn’t when she’s dancing.

At the same time, however, Yerim’s relationship with dance is a complicated one.

Music is something that ingrained itself into her DNA since the very moment she breathed her first breath of life. It makes itself present in the constant hum in the back of her mind as she buries her nose in her textbooks or throws herself into conversations with the eagerness to reach out and connect. Stray melodies her mind picks up on throughout the day – a hot new release playing in her favourite clothes store or the array of ringtones Haseul has designated for everyone she knows or the catchy jingle of the chicken advertisement on TV – they all play in her mind like a constant playlist.

A life without music would be like a life without oxygen.

Dance is different.

If Yerim had to describe the feeling that rushes through her when she thinks of the word, she would describe it like this: dance is her first love.

Yerim feels this rush of endorphins and euphoria when her emotions swelter a little too big and the only form she can express herself so candidly with is through the movement of her body. Sometimes brash, sometimes smooth and flowing.

She feels like how her friends would describe how it feels to be in love. She can’t get the thought of it out of her head. It’s the first thing that she thinks of when she wakes up and the last when she falls asleep. Her heart aches if she goes too long without spending time with it in a way that she truly feels about it – passionately and longingly.

Adoration, bliss, nostalgia, heartbreak… dance gave her everything. And yet Yerim can’t seem to let it go.

In a way, Yerim’s heart hasn’t stopped aching in a while now.

But it’s in moments like these – where the dark living room of the Moon Dorm could never compare to the ambiance that a dance practice room provided but is just enough to suffice her torrid affair with the art – that Yerim’s heart soothes just the slightest. The temporary fix is enough for the faint, bothersome itch in the back of her mind to dissolve. Like a curtain that tumbles to encase her in this muted world where she and her forbidden love for dance can exist in concord. Nothing else matters here. It’s just her and the skip of the beat submerged under layers of synthesisers, clear voices and footsteps.

Everything in the world is right in these moments because Yerim is dancing, and although there aren’t many universal truths in the world Yerim believes in, this one is one is one that haunts her every waking hour and follows her to the depths of her subconscious.

Dance is her first love and no matter how hard she despises it, _no one forgets their first love._

Yerim has come to terms with the complications that came with this relationship early on. (It was a coping mechanism to prevent the further heartbreak that could have ensued had she not realised she could never experience dance the way she did music.) So it’s not even reflex when her body stops what it’s doing the very moment the lights in the living room turn on.

Evidently, she isn’t quick enough.

“I didn’t know you could dance.”

It’s a very well-known fact that Jungeun and Hyunjin are the resident Moon Dorm dancers. Their practices are Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturdays from 7 to 9 in the afternoon with the rest of the advanced group and they periodically hold showcases so members are exposed to potential scouters. They attend one of the most sought-after dance companies, requiring a long auditioning process and hard work for admission, hence why so many of their members have gotten scouted by idol companies in search for talents. When Yerim first discovered this fact during her arrival at the Moon Dorm, her insides had shrivelled up with jealousy and that jealousy had driven her to accidentally let herself grow bitter toward the two girls.

(This caused several misunderstandings and arguments that still haven’t been completely cleared up to this day. However, all of the parties involved prefer not to relive those tense moments, so the matter has been pushed to the side to be forgotten and collect dust.)

Watching Jungeun and Hyunjin dance at those showcases or listening to them discuss their most recent practice around the dorm or even just looking at them in their work out clothes – it makes Yerim’s skin crawl.

But if Yerim is one thing, it’s being a great liar.

So when she turns to find Yeojin standing in the entrance of their dorm, slightly stunned as she takes off her shoes, Yerim’s face doesn’t even show the slightest twist of displeasure currently boiling in her stomach. And her voice is still steady and light as she says, “oh, Yeojin, isn’t it still school hours?” Her hands barely shake as she pulls out her right earphone and casually tucks it behind the shell of her ear so she can hear better. “What are you doing here? Haseul-unnie is gonna kill you for skipping.”

Yeojin, despite her exuberance and young, boisterous front, is terrifyingly perceptive.

There are moments where the last minor of the Moon Dorm remains in the background of the action taking place. Her ears are finely tuned to hidden implications sandwiched between words and the undertones of conversation. She knows just when to drop a comment in so that no one suspects her of her abruptly quiet demeanour yet does so in a way where her words are carefully crafted in the form of a hook. And, almost 9 times out of 10, her fishing for information rewards her with a much too ardent scuffle between whatever dorm residents were in conversation. It’s almost predatory, the smirk on her face as the girls reveal too much information in one of their rants to one another.

Yerim is sure Yeojin has no idea that this is something she’s aware of, though she prefers to keep this to herself. She needs to have something to use as the upper hand with someone like Yeojin around.

“I’m not skipping,” Yeojin says, finally having kicked off her stubborn shoes. “And don’t try to deflect how you were literally dancing just now.”

Laughing as lightly as she can, Yerim wipes the built up sweat from the lower part of her face with the hem of her shirt. “I’m just doing some exercise, like Zumba or something,” she squints her eyes at the younger girl, whose eyes have followed the movement of her shirt to her exposed stomach, “and you’re deflecting just as much.”

Yeojin good-naturedly rolls her eyes dragging her feet across the floorboards as she makes her way over. “I got sent home because of some trouble at school, so the principal thought it would be better for me to leave,” she explains off-handedly.

Her heart continues to beat erratically in her chest from how nervous she suddenly is, though Yerim does a good job of maintaining her cool and simply stretching out her arm as Yeojin approaches. “So basically… you got suspended?” As the smaller girl moves to wrap her arms around her waist, she uses her hand to hook her shoulder and hold her back from moving any closer. “Don’t, I’m sweaty.”

Which she is, because she’s not sure how long she’s been at it but if she had to guess she’d have to say she probably missed the lecture on what makes a good project manager. She can feel the fabric of her shirt clinging to her torso, a bead of sweat sneaking down the back of her neck and her skin beginning to grow cold now that she isn’t moving as zealously as before. But it’s not like she can be surprised. Not when it’s always been easy to lose herself in the music.

“Like I give two shits.” Yeojin shrugs her hand off and throws her arms around her regardless of her warning. When her small hands actually touch her waist, having moved to hug her from the side, her face manifests into one of those exaggerated sneers that tells her just how much she regrets not having heeded the warnings. “Oh wow, you’re fucking soaking.”

A laugh bursts from Yerim’s lips and she cranes her head back so she can look down at the younger girl. “I told you not to.”

Yerim’s arms are still hovering in the air just in case Yeojin changes her mind and decides that she _doesn’t_ want to cling onto a sweaty girl while she’s in her school uniform she most likely needs to use tomorrow. But the small girl must be in one of her moods because she doesn’t respond with a witty remark, or even a tirade about her day that she’s eagerly been keeping in the forefront of her mind so she can share it with the rest of the girls. It’s not necessarily a rare feat, but it’s still strange seeing the melancholy on someone like Yeojin’s face.

The song she had been dancing to tapers off and another seamlessly flows to replace it, but Yerim can hear the slight wheeze that resonates from the vibrations in Yeojin’s throat as she breathes clear as day.

Yeojin keeps her word, because she does not have a care in the world for the way Yerim’s skin is perspiring when she nestles her nose on her collarbone. Her voice is a little raspier than usual, and Yerim is a little scared that her asthma might be acting up when she exhales, “can you hug me?”

It catches Yerim off-guard.

Maybe it’s the fact that Yeojin managed to show up right after she’d allowed herself to dissolve into dance for the first time in months that makes the nostalgic feeling give way to a new kind of ache in her chest. Or maybe it’s the way that Yeojin (although very open with her feelings and her displays of physical affection) just let a kind of vulnerability that seldom rears its head seep into her voice. It could be the sudden change in atmosphere that makes the air a little thicker in texture. A little harder to breathe steady.

Never mind that Yeojin now knows that she dances.

“I should take a shower before we cuddle.” Yerim tries a laugh to dispel the nervous tension telling her to run away. “Your uniform is gonna get dirty.”

Instead of a verbal response, Yeojin’s arms just tighten around her and her face presses a little harder into the place on her collarbones. The hummingbird in Yerim’s chest sings and she has to stretch her neck away to save face. The frown on Yeojin’s mouth shapes itself against her skin. Her long fingernails dig a little too hard into the flesh just above her hip.

Just when Yerim is about to ask Yeojin if she wants to start a new drama and cuddle on the couch for the rest of the day (an attempt to return to a place where she can still keep her at a safe distance yet comfort her when she’s feeling bad), she notices how the door to the dorm clicked open somewhere between when Yeojin had buried her face into her chest and Yerim had been having an internal debate on what to do about it.

“Just hug her already – it’s not like she’s going to be using her uniform until next week.”

Yerim’s arms distractedly drop to wrap around Yeojin’s small shoulders but the latter is already pulling back at the sound of the voice. Her hand rests loosely on Yeojin’s farthest shoulder, keeping the younger girl close.

“Listen Unnie, just because I summoned you from the pits of hell, it doesn’t mean you get to say stupid crap.” Just like that, Yeojin’s guard is up again and although she’s not smiling, the trademark playfulness is there. “I hope you remember what we agreed on.”

“You better watch your tone, kid,” Sooyoung returns the banter just as easy, taking off her shoes. (They’re not the usual fancy heels or boots that she wears whenever she leaves the dorm, and Yerim is almost surprised that the older girl even has work out clothes when she remembers that she’s a model and she probably has to keep her body in shape.) “You’ve been wearing down on me since this morning and I don’t have much patience left for your shit.”

To say that Yerim is surprised Sooyoung is actually _here_ would be an understatement.

It was only yesterday that the girl had packed up a duffel bag with what the girls assumed were her clothes and told them that she wouldn’t be back for a while. There is no actual timescale for what ‘a while’ was. Sometimes it’s two or three days, sometimes it’s for a little over two weeks.

During those vague days/weeks, none of the girls would actually know where Sooyoung disappeared off to. There is a running conspiracy theory between some of the girls that Sooyoung is secretly the wife of a billionaire (or mistress, per Hyejoo’s insistence) and it’s during those times that Sooyoung fulfils her duties as a doting wife. Yerim isn’t particularly against that theory, considering all the high-priced clothes and handbags that the older girl owns, but then again, she _is_ also a part-time model for a reason. Other theories also include girlfriend of the Korean mafia leader, _actual_ Korean mafia leader (proposed by Heejin), upcoming idol in a new girl group, secret stripper in an underground drug cartel’s strip club (Jinsoul got a little carried away with that one)-

The point is- nobody knows what Sooyoung does in her spare time. Also, it’s near impossible to reach her during her disappearances so how Yeojin contacted her is a mystery that is beginning to prick at the back of her mind.

“Unnie,” Yerim says, admittedly shocked, “you’re back again?”

Sooyoung spares her a glance as she shrugs off her bomber jacket. Quickly making her way across the living room, the girl says, “not for long, I just left behind some things I’m picking up and then I’m out again.”

Both Yerim and Yeojin follow the graceful trajectory to Room 3, angling their bodies along with Sooyoung’s movements. “Did you know Sooyoung-unnie can drive?” Yeojin mutters to her, eyes still intently following Sooyoung. “She picked me up from school in a _really_ nice car.”

“Seriously?” Yerim widens her eyes at Yeojin, staring at her side profile. The light in her eyes is a little dimmer than usual, and Yerim wants to reignite it somehow. “So are we going with Heejin-unnie’s theory or Jinsoul-unnie’s?”

“What was Jinsoul-unnie’s again?” Yeojin peeks up at her, a mischievous smirk on her face. “Prostitute?”

Yerim clicks her tongue in distaste and pinches Yeojin’s shoulder where her hand rests. “It’s stripper, where’d prostitute come from?” She butts the side of her jaw against the top of Yeojin’s head as the latter laughs in an unrestrained manner, clumsily leaning into the movement to hit her back. It’s incredibly easy to do considering their height difference.

(It’s always been a little too easy to rest her arm around the younger girl’s shoulders, and a little too easy for her to be tucked comfortably against her side.)

Sooyoung remerges from Room 3 and Yerim takes notice of the sudden clothes change.

“Alright, I’ll see you guys in a couple of days.” The older girl struts across the room confidently. The see-through fishnet shirt puts her toned upper body on display and it’s almost impossible for their eyes not to get drawn to the defined muscles on Sooyoung’s stomach. Yerim, however, avoids the pastel dark red bra that contrasts against the pale skin tone like her eyes will fall out if she even dares take a peek. “Yeojin, you owe me for this one. I expect you to be completing my chores for the next couple of weeks.”

Yeojin scoffs under her breath. “Fine, but only because I actually like you and not because you’re blackmailing me into doing it.”

Making a playful faux grin, Sooyoung shrugs the bomber jacket back over her fishnet shirt, hiding her body again. “Thanks boo.” The kiss she blows in their direction is swatted away by Yeojin’s hands flipping her off, though Sooyoung seems to pay no mind to it.

Yerim is slightly dazed, the past several minutes that have just stormed by taking her for a ride. “Stay safe, Unnie,” she manages to say as Sooyoung puts her shoes back on.

“Thank you, Yerimmie,” Sooyoung’s smile this time is genuine, softer than the grin she had shown Yeojin during their exchanged banter.

Even though the older girl tends to disappear without much explanation as to where she’s going, the care that has grown over the years between all the girls in the dorm is something undeniable. It’s something that even if Sooyoung is ambiguous and very reserved with her private matters, it manages to transcend the uneven grounding that they stand on in terms of information of one another. Yerim cares for Sooyoung like she cares for her siblings: unconditionally and unabashedly.

“Try not to get hit by a truck, Unnie,” Yeojin quips, squeezing Yerim’s hip (an automatic reaction to the mocking expression she makes with her face).

Sooyoung ignores her in favour of checking her reflection one last time in the mirror and making a show of blowing herself a kiss. She’s almost out of the door again when she dips back inside. “Also, one of you keep Jiwoo away from the alcohol if you can – or get one of the older girls to do it.” Her expression is a little darker as she talks, and Yerim wishes that she knew what it meant. “She’s going through a hard time right now and I don’t think she’s talking to anyone about it.”

At the sudden seriousness in conversation, Yeojin reverts back to her sombre mood. She nods once, the gravity evident in her eyes. “Don’t worry, Unnie, we got her.” And despite all of their bickering and banter, there’s something that bonds Yeojin and Sooyoung together that allows them to communicate with just their eyes. “Just go do what you have to do.”

Sooyoung nods, hesitating one last time before smiling tentatively. “If I’m not back by Saturday, I’ll see you next week.”

Yerim is stunned.

This isn’t a vague timeframe – Sooyoung actually gave them days that they should expect her back by. Does that mean that she’s finally starting to trust them more? Is she going to open up about herself? Will they get to know who the real Sooyoung really is or will they be kept in the dark?

“So,” Yeojin turns to look up at her when Sooyoung closes the door and all traces of her presence have disappeared. “Are you going to tell me why you’ve kept the fact that you can dance a secret all this time or will I have to pry it out of you?”

_Ah, right._

Yerim meets Yeojin’s eyes and she recognises the predatory glint almost immediately.

_She’s fucked._

-

Group dinner has been a quiet affair for a couple of days now.

Yerim may hate confrontation (why try to fix something if it isn’t broken?) but that doesn’t mean that she’s oblivious to conflicts happening around the dorm. And she is very aware of the fact that Hyunjin and Heejin are sitting as far apart as possible. She is also aware of the bubbling tension between Chaewon and Yeojin and Jungeun, what with the rent being due in several days ago and the two prior girls not being able to pay up on time. (Yerim had also struggled to reach the deadline, but she has no hard feelings towards the older girl who goes out of her way to handle their financials on top of everything else going on in her life.)

It’s also been four days since Sooyoung had disappeared. It’s Sunday, so the girls know not to expect her to be back until sometime next week or later than that.

With their main source of reason and major peacekeeper, Haseul, being out on a date with her boyfriend tonight, the tension is running high and surprisingly not even Jinsoul’s evident attempts at lightening the mood have done anything to help. If anything, the girls just seem to shrink further into themselves with Hyejoo bluntly telling Jinsoul to stop trying before she causes a disaster.

Call it a coincidence, but this is the first time that both Sooyoung and Haseul are missing from group dinner at the same time, and it seems to be throwing the entire group dynamic for a loop.

While Vivi is the oldest of the Moon Dorm and certainly very respected among all of the girls for her role as their older sister and role model, her personality is not one of brute strength and pressing control like that of Sooyoung and Haseul. And if there’s anything that they have come to learn through the years it’s that if anyone wants to put out the fire that ignites between all of their strong, clashing personalities then merciless strength and a strong voice is what they need. Jungeun is possibly the next, most viable candidate with that spot, but with her most recent spat with Chaewon and Yeojin there is little hope of her being able to rise above the conflict to settle everything down.

Something tells Yerim that if things don’t go to plan, then she may have to prepare herself for things to get physical.

The clinking of cutlery against bowls of food and accidentally clacking against glasses of water on the way back from retrieving the vegetable and egg dish that Vivi had put all of her effort into has never been more awkward. All of the girls have their chins tucked close to their chest. There is a mutual agreement that if they make eye contact with whomever it is they’re arguing with it will start a fight, so their eyes are kept trained to their plates and their neighbours’ beside them.

(That does not apply to Hyejoo, who carelessly manoeuvres herself around the plethora of side dishes on the table to quickly get back to the safety of Room 3. Yerim doesn’t think that Hyejoo even cares that she’s bumping elbows with an incredibly tense Hyunjin to her right, or that her thigh keeps pushing Yerim’s into Jinsoul’s whenever she reaches for the kimchi on the other side of Hyunjin.)

Yerim takes a small sip of water from her glass.

She hates this. It’s not often that the dorm feels like this, but when it does all she wants to do is burst out of there and run as far away from the tension.

There’s a mumbled ‘thank you’ that comes from Heejin across the table as Jiwoo mindlessly puts more rice in her bowl. The sneer that forms on Hyunjin’s face is visible from Yerim’s periphery. And apparently also in Heejin’s, who’s usually large, round eyes portray nothing but light-heartedness and freedom are now narrowed into slits as all of her movements halt in their place. Yerim can read the frustration in the clench of her fists and the tell-tale signs of tears springing to the older girl’s eyes with the bobbing of her throat. (Admittedly, Yerim has comforted Heejin numerous times during whatever dispute it is that she’s having with Hyunjin to become familiar with these signs.)

It seems like Vivi also notices the exchange from her place beside Yeojin and Jiwoo, softly clearing her throat as she sits up in her chair. “Chae, you should eat more rice, you’ve barely had any,” she says as she leans over Yeojin to slide the last portion of rice into the quiet blonde’s bowl.

“I’m not hungry,” Chaewon pushes her bowl away from herself from where she’s sat low in her seat, her arms crossed over her chest.

Hyejoo’s movements don’t seize all the while and she’s swiftly leaning over Hyunjin again to swipe at Chaewon’s neglected bowl before Vivi can tell the blonde to eat more. Hyunjin grumbles and lightly shoves Hyejoo with her shoulder so she sits back in her own space while Chaewon sends the girl an unreadable look. There’s a growing frown on Vivi’s face as she watches the blonde carefully, and Yerim can tell that the situation is weighing down on her as much as it is the other girls who aren’t a part of the conflicts.

“Ya, want shome?” Hyejoo says to Yerim through mouthfuls of food, not waiting for her response and already pouring some of the rice into her almost empty bowl.

“Hye.” Yerim doesn’t want to outright say it, but she can tell that Hyejoo’s brash attitude isn’t sitting well with some of the girls.

“What?” Hyejoo’s eyes snap to meet hers. There’s a dangerous glint in them that says all too well that as much as she acts like she doesn’t care for anything in the world, the stale atmosphere in the room is affecting her too. That she doesn’t like to see the girls fight like this as much as the next person and she just wishes that everyone would sort their own issues out before bringing them to the dinner table.

She exhales heavily through her nose, as if telling her “exactly – you feel the same way” and goes back to her dinner.

Yerim is starting to get a little sick of it.

She just wants things to go back to normal again. Wants their loud, lively dinners with voices climbing and scrambling over one another for a chance to be heard, whatever music recommendations the girls discovered and wanted to share playing on Chaewon’s modernised boombox. (Yerim had asked her why she had one and the blonde had told her it was entirely necessary for her image as an artist.) She wants Yeojin’s raucous laughter ringing loud and clear, and Jinsoul almost falling from her chair whenever one of the girls says something that’s too funny. As nauseating as they were, she misses Heejin and Hyunjin’s strange bickering that often dissolved into borderline flirting (?).

“Hyun, you and Jungeun have a showcase coming up?” Jinsoul manages to say smoothly. It’s almost nonchalant, but her voice wavers a little at the end and gives up evidence of her nerves.

Yerim almost sends her a grateful glance. That is until she notices the choice of conversation topic Jinsoul has decided to use, and all of a sudden she can feel Yeojin’s weighty stare on the side of her face from the other side of the table and her palms are sweating a little too anxiously.

Hyunjin looks a little dazed when she realises someone has spoken to her. She blinks slowly, before swallowing the food in her mouth and angling herself to look at Jinsoul. “Yeah… we started the preparations a couple of days ago,” Hyunjin’s eyes stray from Jinsoul and Yerim can tell that she accidentally made eye contact with Heejin from the way she’s suddenly staring intently at Hyejoo’s puffed cheeks. “It’s gonna be in two months. By the end of summer.”

Humming, Jinsoul leans back in her chair and tentatively glances at Jungeun who hasn’t made a sound the entire time she’s been sat beside her. “Will we get an invite, or will we have to crash it like we did last time?”

There’s a silence that follows that tells Yerim that Jungeun hasn’t realised Jinsoul is talking to her, but she can’t bring herself to look up. Not when the topic is dance.

Jungeun chokes on the discarded beans she had been picking at from Heejin’s plate and Jinsoul startles into action immediately. Everyone’s eyes look up to watch the spectacle that is Jungeun’s face rapidly tinting to become red as Jinsoul panickedly claps at her back and blindly reaches out for a cup of water on the table. Heejin’s movement is almost thoughtless as she quickly moves the cup of water out from Jinsoul’s reach, being able to predict exactly what will happen with the older girl’s clumsiness. She delivers the cup of water to Jungeun safely, and Yerim’s heart warms a little at how routinely it all was.

Even when the room was tense, the girls had grown to take care of one another as if it were second nature.

There’s a snicker that comes from Chaewon and Yeojin’s general direction and, of course, Jungeun’s eyes are quick to snap towards them in a glare.

Yerim takes back what she thought earlier.

“You’re laughing?” Jungeun manages to choke out after gulping down the water.

Chaewon, who is directly in her line of sight, stops whatever mindless game her and Yeojin were playing with their chopsticks and looks at Jungeun with a near murderous glare. “Are you talking to me?” She shoots back, and everyone at the table stops what they’re doing.

Yerim clenches her fists on her thighs and nervously darts her eyes between them.

“I don’t see what’s so funny about me almost choking to death.” The older girl’s eyebrows fly upwards. Jungeun has a habit of lilting her words whenever she’s angry in a way that sounds like she’s speaking with dialect, and it’s something that they had all laughed about some time in the past. She doesn’t think that making fun of her for it now is something that would be safe.

Of course, Chaewon doesn’t particularly care for ‘safe’ whenever conflict is involved.

“Unnie, do you think talking like that will make you scarier, somehow?” Chaewon’s voice is void of any bitterness or anger. Everyone at the table knows, however, what the dullness in her eyes means. “We get that you’re totally in love with Sooyoung-unnie but even going to the lengths of copying her accent is a little too far, don’t you think?”

Yerim scrunches her face up. It may not seem like much, but in the context of the dynamics between the girls, that is possibly the worst thing that Chaewon could have said. And Chaewon knows it.

She perks her eyebrow up.

It’s like a domino effect.

Jungeun slams her cup onto the table so hard that multiple plates leap upward, her glare something sharp and cutting. (Yerim is almost sure the stinging on her nose and back of her eyes is because of it.) Jinsoul, who had been absent-mindedly forgotten to take her hand off Jungeun’s back, snaps her head to look at Chaewon with a kind of confused, conflicted expression that Yerim finds looks not too dissimilar from a kicked puppy. Heejin’s face darkens in a way that Yerim doesn’t think she’s ever seen before, water lining the bottom of her eyes as she stares. Yerim positively feels Hyejoo coil in on herself beside her, gaze snapping to Chaewon in a way that is either accusatory or alarmed.

She’s sure that each of the girls at the table had their own reaction.

What surprises Yerim the most, however, is how Jiwoo reacts.

Yerim can still remember Sooyoung’s words to her and Yeojin before she left: _“she’s going through a hard time right now.”_

True to the testimony, Yerim had taken to quietly observing Jiwoo’s behaviour from afar and along with the hand of quiet conversation with Yeojin, the two had come to the agreement that there was something very off about the older girl.

She was quieter than usual, keeping to herself and minding her own business. There were less male university students coming home with her to do her part of whatever project she had been given. Instead, Jiwoo could often be seen diligently working at the Room 3 desk late into the night while Yerim lazed around in Chaewon’s bed. The skinship was a major factor, however. Where Jiwoo was usually clingy – draping herself off of whoever was near or holding empty hands – she now shied away from distracted brushes of the arm or cuddles on the couch with Yerim and Heejin.

Never mind the alcohol.

It was no secret that Jiwoo loved to go out and party with her friends, but she often came home before midnight even if she was too drunk to walk in a straight line. But ever since that one night that Jiwoo hadn’t come home at her usual time and hours trickled into the notorious 3am, her ventures to clubs and pubs had decreased to none.

Yerim was only vaguely aware of what happened that night because there had been a lot of rustling in Room 2 (Jungeun panicking over the safety of her childhood best friend, desperately searching for her phone). There was barely supressed talk in the living room, and Yerim had peeked out to see what all the commotion was about. Sooyoung was telling the girls who were awake (all of Room 3 and Haseul, Vivi and Jungeun) to stay put while went to pick up Jiwoo from her unknown location. Yerim had silently watched her rush out of the dorm in her pyjamas, and she felt the dread sinking in as she tried to remember a time where Sooyoung had ever left their dorm and she wasn’t dressed for the runway.

Whatever Jiwoo is struggling with, it’s a mystery to them all. Not even Jungeun knows what’s going on with her, and Jungeun knows everything about her.

Yeojin had told Yerim that if this continued, that there would be a time where Jiwoo eventually bubbled over and unleashed her frustrations on all of them. Yerim still remembers her response.

_“No, Jiwoo-unnie is the sweetest, most innocent person – she would never do anything to hurt us.”_

“What on earth are you trying to imply, Park Chaewon.”

If Yerim asked any of the girls who they thought the scariest resident of the Moon Dorm is, they would have probably said someone like the likes of Hyejoo, who is harsh with her words and withering with her glares. Sooyoung or Jungeun would be the next candidates, often unafraid to put someone in their place and speak out their minds with an almost wild demeanour. Hell, even Hyunjin or Jinsoul could be mentioned, what with their anger often being expressed in a much more turbulent manner than most.

No one expected Jiwoo to be a candidate.

Yerim didn’t expect herself to shrink back in her seat because of the bitterness dripping from Jiwoo’s voice, the crazed spark in her eye and adrenaline-inducing tug of the mouth.

Even Chaewon is surprised.

“Are you trying to say that she’s a _lesbian?_ ”

And just like that, it’s like a bomb has been dropped on the dinner table and exploded right in their faces.

It’s in the way that Jiwoo says it. Yerim knows that lesbian isn’t a curse word. It’s not something that should be used to insult someone with, nor is it something that someone should be ashamed of for labelling themselves as such. But, _it’s in the way that Jiwoo says it_.

No one really knows where to go from here. They’re either too stunned at the completely different Jiwoo that is sat in front of them, or they’ve been rooted to their seats by a word that had never been uttered in the confines of their dorm. Yerim thinks that none of the girls had even brought themselves to ever think of the word – especially not until now.

Jiwoo, despite her furious tone and hatred seeping into her voice, looks like she’s going to be sick. If Yerim weren’t so affected by the word (why is she so affected by the word?) she would try to reach out to Jiwoo and ask her if she needed to excuse herself from the table. Because it was as if just enunciating the word ‘lesbian’ had broken something inside of Jiwoo and had picked up her stomach and crushed it underfoot.

“I think it’s best if you stop here before you go too far.” Vivi isn’t looking at Jiwoo, her gaze trained intently on the wall behind Hyunjin’s head in front of her, but everyone can hear the frostiness in her voice.

This is perhaps the first time that Yerim has heard Vivi speak to any of them like this.

Like she wants to throw them out right that moment.

Jiwoo notices – of course she notices, Jiwoo isn’t dumb – and she slowly turns to look at Vivi. “Go too far?” Her voice is quiet, anticipatory of what’s to come. “Too far with what? It’s not like any of us are actually like _that_.”

No one says anything about several girls at the table flinching.

Yerim is paralyzed to her chair.

“ _Kim Jiwoo._ ” For the first time since Yerim has met Vivi, it’s now that she raises her voice in anger. Her head has snapped to look Jiwoo in the eye and Yerim is almost positive that if she were in Jiwoo’s position she would have dissolved to tears right then and there. She commends Jiwoo for her only reaction being the slight faltering of her expression.

“That’s really low of you, Unnie.”

Heads turn toward Hyunjin where she’s quietly placed down her bowl and chopsticks in a neat manner. Her eyes are unwavering as they come to meet Jiwoo’s, and the near sneer that has shaped on her face resembles almost too much like a tiger ready to snap at its prey.

“I never expected you of all people to be someone so hateful towards people who have done nothing wrong.” Hyunjin always delivers her commentary softly, as if she were trying to do the person receiving a favour by softening the blow for them. It’s most likely that false consideration that usually tips people over the edge. The condescending manner in which Hyunjin’s carefully crafted comments land where their pride is hidden.

Yerim sees the fear that shoots through Jiwoo in the jerking of her body. “What are you saying, ‘ _me of all people’_?” Her voice raises itself, and Yerim can feel the onslaught rising on the back of her neck. “Things between a man and a man – or a woman and a woman are wrong. It’s unnatural – there is something wrong with you if you think that something like _that_ should be accepted.”

“Stop saying it like it’s gross,” Hyunjin’s voice trembles, fists visibly clenched on the table.

“Woah,” Hyejoo is laughing beside Yerim, but the venom in her voice is clear as day. “Kim Jiwoo, I never pegged you for a _bigot_.”

Jiwoo freezes.

“Hey,” Heejin is frowning so deep that Yerim is afraid permanent wrinkles will form there if she doesn’t stop soon, “there’s no reason to be rude.”

Multiple voices ring out at once – Hyejoo’s, “I’m not being rude, I’m just telling the truth” along with Hyunjin’s, “are you being fucking serious, Heejin?” to Jinsoul’s panicked, “girls, let’s not fight-“

Yerim sees Hyunjin push herself back from the table, her glare pinned on Heejin who sits farthest diagonally from her. Beside her, Hyejoo follows her instinctively, as if readying for a fight. “Don’t tell me that you think the same thing as this fucking homophobe.” She dismissively gestures towards Jiwoo’s direction, and even Yerim is a little stung by the sudden use of informal language.

“Ya! Kim Hyunjin you better watch your tone,” Jungeun somehow manages to tangle herself into the fight, and Yerim understands why she takes Jiwoo’s side but at the same time, there was a part of her that expected a little more from someone like Jungeun. Someone who, despite their rocky start with the misunderstandings stemming from Yerim’s place of insecurity, Yerim rapidly came to see as a role model. Someone that Yerim could look towards and see something that she once could have been. So it’s no wonder that it stings when she takes Jiwoo’s side in this.

“I don’t think the same thing, I just think that you’re being unnecessarily rude to her,” Heejin is quick to rebut.

“Rightfully so,” Chaewon pipes in, having picked up on the mutual teaming up currently forming in front of her and wanting to go against Junguen. “What she said was way out of line.”

“Rich of you to say that, Park.” Jungeun snaps, and Yerim sighs to herself because this is just the two of them using somebody else’s disagreement to take out their frustrations on one another. “I remember you saying something to me the other day that was quite ‘out of line’ yet you don’t seem to regret it much, do you?”

“It was _one_ comment, let it _go_ , hag.”

“Guys, let’s all take a breath so we can calm down-“

“No, you know what-“ Jungeun shoots out from her chair, the sound of it scattering backwards across the kitchen tiles screeching in Yerim’s ears. “I don’t think I _can_ let it go- what you said was rude not only to me, but to Jinsoul. The least you can do as a bare minimum decent person is give her an apology.”

Jinsoul grimaces from where she was spoken over. “That’s not really necessary-“

“That’s a pretty fucking hypocritical statement you have there,” Hyunjin rises from her place, slapping her hand down on the table with her chopsticks still between her fingers. “I think we can all remember the time you thought Yerim didn’t pay her part of the rent and wanted to kick her out before giving her the benefit of the doubt, when it reality it was _your_ fault that _you_ lost her share and she had to pay extra.”

Yerim jolts at being brought into the argument.

She feels several eyes from Room 3 land on her at the statement and is reminded that this is something that none of them have talked about since that moment.

“Don’t pin the blame on me, Kim.” Jungeun jolts forward, her thighs bumping against the table and accidentally shoving it almost into Chaewon’s chest. “I remember exactly what you said when we were discussing that- something about ‘not needing someone who thought arts was a stupid career anyways’-“

“This is getting out of hand…” Jinsoul says, though it’s so quiet it’s most likely just an observation.

“Can you watch it?” Chaewon pushes back from where the table has almost been knocked into her, glaring intently at Jungeun.

“I’m not the one who hasn’t apologised to Yerim to this day,” Hyunjin powers on, ignoring Chaewon’s own complaints towards Jungeun.

Jiwoo also rises from her chair, eyes trained on Chaewon. “Don’t talk down to her.”

At the movement, Hyejoo also seems to think that she has a place in this fight and follows suit of the rest of the girls. “I don’t think you get a say in this, bigot.”

“Hyejoo!” Vivi has been trying to get Jiwoo to calm down, but all the other girls jumping into the argument isn’t doing anything to stop the fire that is constantly building and building. The more words that are being spewed the more fuel is being added. Yerim is almost positive that by the end of this conversation it will be a miracle if any friendships are left untarnished – even more of a miracle if things are able to go back to normal after something like this.

There are a million phrases being scampered across the table. Information that rises out of the depths of private matters – small disagreements on the smallest of things around the house that have amounted into larger hindrances. Yerim doesn’t think she’s ever heard Hyejoo swearing this much if it wasn’t at that one rage inducing game Yeojin had coerced her into trying. From her other side, Jinsoul is crying from the frustration at not being able to do anything to calm the girls down, which only seems to spur Jungeun further on to pinning the blame on Chaewon leading to more angry, tearful rants from her.

Heejin and Hyunjin are talking again, except Jiwoo has been thrown into the mix and the topic is about homophobia, so Yerim doesn’t think that they’re going to go back to their usual soft selves any time soon.

Vivi and Hyejoo are arguing about god-knows what, with Chaewon sometimes chiming in with whatever valiant attempts she has to justify Hyejoo’s behaviour.

In the midst of it all, Yerim is taken back to a time where the music in her head had been cut off.

There was no melody, no beat, no tune.

Only anger, and screaming, and tears.

She remembers sitting at a dinner table, not to dissimilar to the one she sits at now with the girls who she sees as her family, and this exact scenario taking place.

Every night.

For seven years.

There is no music. Without any music there is no oxygen.

“I don’t fucking care if you think you’re some hotshot celebrity now that the dance coach has her attention on you, but that doesn’t mean you’re above saying sorry for something that you were obviously wrong about!” Hyunjin is shouting at Jungeun.

“There’s no point in apologising for something that happened _two years ago_.” Jungeun is laughing numbly. “I swear to god you guys need to learn how to let things go.”

“You’re a hypocrite,” Chaewon points out.

“The least you could do is apologise to Yerim.”

“Yerim is over it! She told me that she didn’t care about it anymore!”

“Of course she would fucking say that! Are you stupid? It’s called being polite!”

Jungeun turns to her. “Yerim, are you over it?”

Hyunjin and Chaewon are also turning to her.

_“Yerim, is it me or your dad?”_

Yerim can’t breathe.

_“You have to choose one – your sisters already chose.”_

“Yerim?”

“Yo, leave her alone, can’t you see you’re bothering her?”

“…Yeojin, did you just talk down to me?”

“Look, I don’t fucking care about that right now, just leave her alone-“

“You little-“

“Can you all just stop?!” Yerim’s voice is shrill due to misuse, but it’s loud and it gets its point across.

And just like she asked, everything does stop. Whoever had just been swearing at someone’s dog (how had the argument gotten there?) stopped in the middle of their sentence. Whatever it was that Hyunjin had been about to say to Yeojin caught in her throat. Jiwoo and Vivi’s squabbling halted.

“Please just- shut up before you ruin your friendships beyond the point of no return.”

The girls stare at her – Heejin and Jinsoul with wet cheeks and snot running down their noses – as if amazed that Yerim is like this.

Livid, despairing, broken.

Yerim’s eyes naturally fall on Jiwoo, who has been sat across from her this entire time but Yerim hasn’t had the courage to really look at her since she said what she said. “Jiwoo-unnie-“

_“She’s going through a hard time right now and I don’t think she’s talking to anyone about it.”_

“-I don’t know what it is you’re going through that’s making you act like this, but I want you to know that even if you think we’re not, we’re here for you. Lashing out, shutting down… whatever it is that’s making you pull away and making you hate yourself so much, you don’t have to work through it alone.” Yerim desperately hopes that Jiwoo understands how important this is. “We’re a family for a reason.”

Jiwoo’s eyes are wide – like she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t be doing. Yerim can see how they glisten under the warm kitchen light.

“I don’t know if you guys have forgotten it too but _we’re a family for a reason_.” Her gaze is trained on the table in front of her. She can’t bare to bring herself to look any of the girls in the eye right now. “You’re all just here, saying things that you don’t really mean to each other because you’ve had hard days. You’ve all had a hard time and you’re just taking it out on each other, and that is not okay. The reasons why you’re so angry at one another are not in this room.” It’s what she had done to Jungeun and Hyunjin when she had first arrived at the Moon Dorm. It was the first lesson that she had learnt with them here. “It’s okay to fight without shouting.”

“Yerim…”

A cold sense of determination washes over her.

Yerim looks up at Jungeun, whose shoulders have sunk low and face has melted into a defeated kind of sadness. “I’m not over it. What you did back then really hurt me, and it still haunts me sometimes.” She can see how her words are hurting Jungeun, but this is something that she needs to say. “It’s the reason why I get panic attacks around pay time because I don’t have the correct amount of money sometimes.”

Her eyes water from the relief at finally getting to say what she has been holding back all this time. It’s like a large boulder has been lifted from where it was sat on her chest, inhibiting her breathing.

She meets Hyunjin’s mournful eyes and almost stops to wonder at how expressive they can be. “I forgave you guys, but I don’t know if you guys forgave me for what I said about your dreams.” Hyunjin goes to open her mouth to say something, but Yerim cuts her off before she can. “I was jealous. I _am_ jealous.”

She can see Yeojin from her periphery. Can see how she sinks back into her chair with a thoughtful kind of expression on her face.

“I’m so so jealous that you guys actually got to chase the dreams that you wanted to chase after – that you guys were _free_ to live your lives how you wanted to live them.” Yerim can feel herself wavering but she presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth to stop herself from falling. “I love dance. I love it with everything that I am, and I don’t think I can ever live a happy life without it but- if I don’t get this business degree then I don’t think I’ll be able to live at all.”

The realisation that dawns on Hyunjin’s face is almost in synchronisation with the feeling of her stomach dropping.

“I won’t be able to live at all and I- I can’t do that to my sisters.”

She feels sick.

Like the room is closing in on her.

The music is buffering in her head and it’s all just too much.

_“Unnie, please get me out of here…”_

Yerim shoves herself away from the table and she’s rushing out of the room like it finally caught fire. She can feel the flames licking at her heels – a hand scorching her back as it tries to pull her back into the heat, but she prospers.

_“Please, I can’t take it anymore.”_

She will always prosper.

She made sure of it when she quelled all hopes of letting herself be with her first love the way that she wanted to be.

Wholly, unabashedly, freely.

-

Yerim is dazedly walking down the dim lit streets when she crosses paths with the person she least expected to find here.

“You’re gonna catch a cold.”

Her feet stop before she can tell them to and her blank gaze comes to rest on the silhouette hiding in the shadows of the street. She recognises the voice immediately, though with everything that has just devolved back in the place she thought of as a safe haven, she isn’t against thinking that it’s all a figment of her imagination.

Like a villain emerging from the shadows, Sooyoung steps out from the narrow street she had been walking down and into the orange glow of the streetlight above them.

Yerim wasn’t too sure what to expect.

This isn’t it.

“Running away from home is never the answer,” Sooyoung shrugs the same bomber jacket she had been wearing several days ago off her frame to tug it around Yerim. The provocative fishnet shirt is gone and in its place is an oversized graphic t-shirt with some American artist printed onto the front. “Even if your family is stupid and doesn’t know how to function without Haseul or me around to keep them in check.”

The warmth that wraps itself around her is so encompassing that Yerim can’t help but let her eyes fall close. It feels like the world is taking her in its arms and curling itself around her. There’s a gentle promise that she will never get hurt ever again being pressed into her skin where the soft fabric meets.

A tear slips and it’s quick to pick up traction down her cheek and off her chin.

“Aigoo, they really hurt you, didn’t they?” The sound of Sooyoung’s boots scuffing the pavement is starting loud, but all Yerim can hear is the ups and downs of the melody in Sooyoung’s voice as she pulls her into a hug. Her hand is gently patting at the back of her head, similar to how she does to her little sisters to praise them or make them feel better when they’re down. It’s unfamiliar to be on the receiving end of it for once. “It’s okay baby, they’re really stupid sometimes. It’s not your fault.”

Yerim is sobbing before she knows it, her hands refusing to pull Sooyoung any closer than what she allows. The fabric of Sooyoung’s shirt is tucked between her fingers as she grips at her sides, and for once, Yerim lets herself be the one to be treated like a kid.

Sooyoung is quiet, though she hums small assurances and encouragements that sound like little songs to soothe her. “What do you want to do, huh?” The older girl pats at her back reassuringly, letting her cries taper off into more controlled sniffles. “Do you want to go back, or do you want to stay somewhere else for tonight?”

Releasing a shaky breath, Yerim pulls away from Sooyoung’s body and wipes at her face. “I’m okay,” she says, though it’s more of a goal that she wants to reach than an actual statement.

Still, Sooyoung nods along and tenderly helps her wipe her tears away. “I know you are,” a small teasing grin forms on her face and she’s softly nudging Yerim’s shoulder with two of her wrapped knuckles, “but that doesn’t answer my question.”

Yerim laughs a little but it still feels wrong, so she lets it melt into the night.

Instead she takes in Sooyoung’s appearance.

“Unnie, why do you have so many bruises?”

Sooyoung’s left cheek is swollen up with an array of colours that should not be present on human skin – yellows and greens and hints of purple. Her usual glossed lips look like they’re still healing from being split on the same side where her cheek is swollen, the cut noticeable with the red flesh peeking through. Yerim takes in mind the plaster on her right temple and wonders what kind of wound it attempts to conceal with its pale colour. And the bruises don’t stop at Sooyoung’s face; Yerim can see purple splotches peeking from under the hem of the older girl’s shirt, along with her bandaged hands and the shoulder support revealed by the uneven tug of the shirt.

Yerim doesn’t want to fear the worst, but she’s prepared to call the police right that moment in case her suspicions are correct.

A soft smile forms on Sooyoung’s face, though there’s this slight melancholy in it that makes Yerim’s heart ache for the older girl.

“I fought someone,” she says plainly. “I would love to tell you more but it’s a long story and I don’t want you actually catching a cold because we’re standing out here too long.”

This is a side of Sooyoung that she has never seen before. So openly fatigued and exhausted – not only physically but also psychologically as her eyes become momentarily unfocused. Like all of her masks and facades have been tucked away into a drawer and it’s just… Sooyoung.

Yerim sighs, feeling the tension in her body lightening a little with Sooyoung here to help carry the weight.

“And I probably should check up on Jiwoo…” At the mention of the girl, Yerim feels her body become taut all over again. Sooyoung notices immediately and her expression clouds with unsaid thoughts and emotions that are far too difficult for Yerim to read in this state of mind. “Yeojin texted me as soon as shit started to go down- she’s been giving me updates even though I didn’t really ask for them but at least I’m up to date with all the melodrama you guys caused.”

“Yeah, I think… I think you were right about her,” Yerim says, and Sooyoung carefully meets her eyes. “I think she’s going through a lot right now.”

A pensive expression settles itself on Sooyoung’s face. Before Yerim can try to pry for information, the older girl is throwing an arm over her shoulder and pulling her close into her side. “Come on, there’s some scolding your Unnie has to do at home.” Her tone is light, though the annoyance seeps through anyway. “Hyejoo was swearing like her vocabulary was limited to curses, wasn’t she?” They laugh together when Yerim doesn’t even have to answer for Sooyoung to know. “And I bet Jinsoul was crying her eyes out – that softie.”

“I think Unnie just cries when she’s angry, though.” Yerim tries to salvage Jinsoul’s image, but Sooyoung still laughs at the thought.

A nice silence settles between them and Yerim can feel the gentle lull of music pick back up again.

It’s a bitter symphony – reflective of the near unbearable ache in her chest – but it’s a symphony, and Yerim will embrace it no matter how sad it truly is.

“Also, I’m gonna murder Yeojin- that little brat won’t stop spamming my phone with calls and messages.” Sooyoung scowls, pulling said phone out from her back pocket and putting it on silent. Sure enough, the screen lights up with a goofy contact picture of Yeojin’s face taken some time when some of the girls had gone out to the movies together on a whim. Yerim hadn’t been able to attend because of her classes, but she got to hear all about it at a peaceful dinner table from multiple different perspectives.

Yerim hopes that everything will turn out okay with the girls. Even if they fight a lot and say horrible things to each other, she thinks that they still love one another.

“What’s she calling so much for?” Yerim asks, mostly to keep the conversation going, partly because she’s curious what it is that the younger girl and Sooyoung talk about.

Sooyoung squeezes her shoulder and pulls her a little closer, their heads almost bumping from the closeness. A wistful tinge graces her features as she stares straight on, and Yerim thinks that even though Sooyoung is very reserved with her thoughts and life, she holds a lot of emotions that are just waiting to topple out. Hopefully not like how Jiwoo had let them spill over at dinner.

She thinks that Sooyoung isn’t going to answer. That her question will just be left to drift off into the cold night breeze.

“You,” Sooyoung says finally, with something in her voice. “She’s calling for you.”

She’s not sure what she’s feeling in that moment, but if she had to compare it to anything, it’s similar to the feeling she gets when she thinks about dance.

Yerim’s heart is dancing.


End file.
